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PARIS 



IN OLD AND PRESENT TIMES 

WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO CHANGES IN ITS 
ARCHITECTURE AND TOPOGRAPHY 



BY 



/" 



PHILIP GILBERT^ HAMERTON 

OfUcier d'' Academie 




WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS 
BOSTON 

ROBERTS brother: 

1885 



^ 



Copyright, 1885, 
By Roberts Brothers. 



i!3m6tr0ttn ^^rcss : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



PREFACE. 



IT is probable that there is not another city in the 
whole world that has undergone so many and such 
great changes as the capital of France. Those of us 
who have been familiar with Paris since the accession 
of Louis Napoleon have been eye-witnesses of the last 
of these, which consisted chiefly in improving the 
means of communication by opening wide new streets, 
and in erecting vast numbers of houses of a new 
type. From the sanitary point of view the change 
was most desirable and circulation was made incom- 
parably easier; from the artistic point of view there 
was a balance of loss and gain, as the old streets were 
not always, or often, worth preserving, while the new 
ones have always some pretension, at least to taste 
and elegance, and many new buildings are really good 
examples of modern intelligence and art. But there is 
a certain point of view from which this reconstruction 
of an ancient city was entirely to be regretted. Archae- 
ologists deplored the effacement of a thousand land- 
marks, and if it had not been for their patient labors 
in preserving memorials of the former city on paper, 
the topography of it would have been as completely 



iv Preface. 

effaced from the recollection of mankind as it is from 
the actual site. Were it not for the existence of a very 
few old buildings such as Notre Dame, the Sainte 
Chapelle, the Hotel de Cluny, and one or two other 
remnants of past architectural glories, Paris might seem 
to date from the age of Louis XIV. ; and even the 
remaining works of the great king are not sufficiently 
numerous to give an aspect to the city, which seems 
as new as Boston or New York, — I had almost written, 
as Chicago. While Avignon and Aiguesmortes pre- 
serve their ancient walls, the enceinte of Paris has been 
repeatedly demolished, carried farther out, and recon- 
structed on new principles of fortification. While the 
palace of the Popes still rears its colossal mass on its 
rocky height near the Rhone, and withstands, unshaken, 
the unequalled violence of the mistral that sweeps down 
upon Avignon, the palace of the mediaeval kings has 
almost entirely disappeared from the island in the 
Seine, and the old Castle of the Louvre is represented 
by an outline in white stone traced in the pavement 
of a quadrangle. Of the wall of Philippe- Auguste the 
very last tower has long since disappeared, and the 
grim fortress of the Bastille has utterly vanished from 
its site, known to modern Parisians as a stopping-place 
for omnibuses. Nor has the more modern palace of 
the Tuileries escaped a similar annihilation. The last 
stone of it was carted away not long since, and our best 
record of its ruin is a little study or picture by Meis- 
sonier. Every year it becomes less and less profitable 
to visit Paris in ignorance of its past history; and there- 



^ 



reface, v 

fore it has seemed to me that such an account of the 
city as I should care to write must include constant 
reference to what has been, as well as a sufficiently 
clear description of what is. This has not been done 
before in our language, and would not have been possi- 
ble now if the admirable labors of many French archae- 
ologists had not supplied the materials. I need not 
add that whenever anything could be verified by per- 
sonal observation, I have taken the trouble to see 
things for myself. Paris has been very familiar to 
me for nearly thirty years; but in spite of this long 
intimacy with the place, I went to stay there again with 
a view especially to the present work, 

I may add that, although I have written little hitherto 
about architecture, it has always been a favorite study 
of mine, and I have neglected no opportunity of in- 
creasing such knowledge of it as a layman may possess. 
The facts about the history and construction of edifices 
given in the present volume may, I believe, always 
be rehed upon ; as for mere opinions, I give them for 
what they may be worth. .The best way is for a critic 
to say quite candidly what he thinks, but not to set up 
any claim to authority. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Introduction i 

II. LUTETIA i6 

III. A Voyage round the Island 34 

IV. Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle ... 59 
V. The Tuileries and the Luxembourg .... 82 

VI. The Louvre 104 

VIL The H6tel de Ville 125 

VIII. The Pantheon, the iNVALroES, and the Made- 
leine 139 

IX. St. Eustache, St. Etienne du Mont, and St. 

SuLPiCE 159 

X. Parks and Gardens 174 

XL Modern Parisian Architecture 197 

XII. The Streets 219 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PAGE 

Transept of Notre Dame 4 

Old House with Tourelle 9 

The Hotel de Cluny 13 

The old Maison Dieu, and North Transept of Notre 

Dame 14 

The Frigidarium of the Roman Baths, called Les 

Thermes 20 

The Grand Chatelet 28 

The Tour de Nesle. From the Etching by Callot . 30 

The Louvre of Philippe-Auguste 32 

Garden east of Notre Dame 40 

Pont Notre Dame, iSth Century 44 

The Pump near the Pont Notre Dame, 1861 ... 46 

The Pont Neuf in 1845 50 

The Morgue in 1840 . 52 

The Little Chatelet, taken from the Petit Pont 

IN 1780 54 

The Archbishop's Palace in 1650. From an Etching 

BY Israel Sylvestre 56 

Anglers on the Quays 58 

Tympanum of the Porte Ste. Anne 64 

Pier and one of the Doors of the Porte Ste. Anne 66 

Les Tribunes . . . '. 68 

The " PouRTOUR " 70 



X List of Illustrations. 



PAGE 



Royal Thanksgiving in Notre Dame, 1782 .... 74 

The old Court of Accounts and the Sainte Chapelle 78 

Saint Louis in the Sainte Chapelle 80 

The Tuileries in 1837 96 

The Luxembourg as it was built .100 

The Louvre in its Transition State from Gothic to 

Renaissance 104 

The Louvre, from the Seine. From a Drawing by 

H. ToussAiNT 106 

Details by Pierre Lescot in the Quadrangle . . 107 

The Classical Pavilion and the old Eastern Tower iio 
The Interior of the Quadrangle. From a drawing 

by h. toussaint ii4 

Quadrangle of the Louvre, with the Statue of 

Francis L, placed there in 1855, and since 

removed 118 

The Colonnade. From a drawing by H. Toussaint 120 

Perrault's Colonnade. Interior View 122 

An old Room in the Louvre 124 

Front of the h6tel de Ville in the Time of Louis 

XIII 128 

The Hotel de Ville in 1583. From a Drawing by 

Jacques Cellier 130 

The Great B all-Room 136 

The Pantheon 142 

The Pantheon from the Gardens of the Luxembourg 146 

The Invalides 152 

The Madeleine 155 

The Church of St. Eustache 160 

Church of St. Etienne du Mont. From Sketch by 

A. Brunet-Debaines 162 

Interior of St. Etienne du Mont 164 

West Front of St. Etienne du Mont 168 

The Church of St. Sulpice 170 

Grande Allee des Tuileries 181 



List of Illustrations. xi 

PAGE 

Lac des Buttes Chaumont 183 

Le Trocadero . 184 

Avenue des Champs Elys]ees . 186 

Au Jardin du Luxembourg 188 

Lac du Bois de Boulogne 190 

La Naumachie, — Parc de Monceau 192 

Doorway of a Modern House 204 

The Opera. Side View . 206 

The Opera. The Principal Front 208 

Interior of the Church of St. Augustine .... 210 

The Church of St. Augustine 212 

Interior of the Church of La Trinite 214 

The Church of La Trinite 216 

Boulevard St. Germain • . 222 

Avenue Friedland 228 

Hotel de Sens 230 

The Mairie and St. Germain l'Auxerrois .... 234 
Rue des Chiffonniers, Paris. Drawn by Leon 

Lhermitte 236 



PARIS 

IN OLD AND PRESENT TIMES. 



I. 

INTRODUCTION. 

NATIONALITY affects our estimates of every- 
thing, but most especially does it affect our 
estimate of great cities. There is no city in the world 
that does not stand in some peculiar relation to our 
own nationality ; and even those cities that seem quite 
outside of it are still seen through it, as through an 
atmosphere colored by our national prejudices or ob- 
scured by our national varieties of ignorance. 

Again, not only does nationality affect our estimates, 
but our own individual idiosyncrasy affects them to a 
degree which unthinking persons never even suspect. 
We come to every city with our own peculiar constitu- 
tion, which no amount of education can ever alter fun- 
damentally ; and we test everything in the place by its 
relation to our own mental and even physical needs. 
We may try to be impartial, to get at some sort of 
abstract truth that has nothing to do with ourselves ; 



2 Paris. 

but it is not of any real use. There is a certain relation 
between human beings and places which determines, in 
a wonderfully short time, to what degree we are capable 
of making ourselves at home in them, — how much of 
each place belongs to us by reason of the obscure 
natural affinities. 

Before entering upon this great subject, Paris, I think 
it will not be a waste of space, or a useless employment 
of the reader's time, if I show in what way our estimate 
of that city is likely to be affected by our national and 
our personal peculiarities. 

First, as to nationality. Englishmen admire Paris; 
they speak of it as a beautiful city, even a delightful 
city; but there is one point on which a Frenchman's 
estimate of Paris usually differs from that of an English- 
man, I am not alluding to the Frenchman's patriotic 
affection for the place ; that, of course, an Englishman 
cannot have, and can only realize by the help of power- 
ful sympathies and a lively imagination. I am alluding 
to a difference in the impression made by the place it- 
self on the mind of a French and an English visitor. 
The Englishman thinks that Paris is pretty ; the French- 
man thinks that it is sublime. The Englishman admits 
that it is an important city, though only of moderate 
dimensions; the Frenchman believes it to be an im- 
mensity, and uses such words as "huge" and "gigantic" 
with reference to it, as we do with reference to London. 
Victor Hugo compares Paris with the ocean, and affirms 
that the transition from one to the other does not in any 
way exalt one's ideas of the infinite. *' Aticun milieu 



Introduction. 3 

n' est phis vaste," he says, very willingly leaving the much 
larger British capital out of consideration. For him 
Paris is everywhere, like the air, because it is ever 
present in his thoughts. " On regarde la mer, et on voit 

Paris r 

We Enghshmen, always remembering London, and 
more or less consciously referring every city to that, 
are very liable to a certain form of positive error with 
regard to Paris, against which, if we care for truth, it 
is well to put ourselves on our guard. Most things in 
Paris seem to us on rather a small scale. The river 
seems but a little river, as we so easily forget its length 
and the distance of Paris from the sea ; and most of the 
buildings that Englishmen care to visit are near enough 
to their usual haunts to produce the impression that the 
town itself is small. The Louvre, the Luxembourg, 
Notre Dame, the Madeleine, the Opera, and the Palais 
de r Industrie, are included within that conveniently cen- 
tral space which to the Englishman is Paris. Even the 
very elegance of the place is against it, insomuch as it 
produces an impression of slightness. A great deal of 
very substantial building has been done in Paris at all 
times, and especially since the accession of Napoleon 
in. ; yet how little this substantial quality of Parisian 
building is appreciated by the ordinary English visitor ! 
I remember making some remark to an Englishman on 
the good fortune of the Parisians in possessing such ex- 
cellent stone, and on their liberal use of it, and on its 
happy adaptability to the purpose of the carver. The 
only answer I got was a laugh at my own simplicity. 



4 Paris. 

" That white stuff is not stone at all ; it 's only stucco ! " 
This observer had seen hundreds of carvers chiselling 
that stone, yet he went back to London complacently 
believing that all its ornaments were cast. Here you 
have a striking example of patriotic error, — the stone 
of a foreign city believed to be stucco because stucco 
'is a flimsy material, and because it was not agreeable 
to recognize in foreign work the qualities of soundness 
and truth. Even in this mistake may be traced the 
pre-disposing influence of London. Stucco has been 
used in very large quantities in London ; and the stone 
employed there in public buildings, though of various 
kinds, is never of the kind most extensively employed 
in Paris. 

It is unnecessary to dwell any longer upon what 
Mr. Herbert Spencer would call the " patriotic bias." 
French people bring the same bias with them into Eng- 
land, and write accounts of London with astounding 
inaccuracy. In one of the most recent of these there 
occurred a description of the House of Lords, giving no 
idea whatever of its architecture, and stating that it was 
not bigger than an ordinary council-room in a provincial 
mairie} Many things in London are as heartily de- 
spised by intelligent Englishmen as they can possibly 
be by foreigners, but the foreigner shows his own patri- 
otic bias by dwelling upon them, and by slighting allu- 

1 I am inclined to think that the Frenchman's notions of size had 
been upset by passing through Westminster Hall ; but the patriotic bias 
in his account of the Houses of Parliament was shown by his omission 
of architectural appreciation, and by his extreme readiness to describe 
what he supposed to be eccentricities or defects. 




TRANSEPT OF NOTRE DAME. 



Introduction. 5 

sions to what is really good and noble in London, — for 
example, when he passes by St. Paul's as a feeble imita- 
tion of St. Peter's at Rome, or speaks of the Law Courts 
as a medley of Gothic details, without doing justice to 
the originality of either Wren or Street. A French 
critic is usually so horrified by London smoke and by 
the ugliness of our ordinary houses, that he becomes 
incapable of perceiving beauty even where it really ex- 
ists, and confounds all things together in undiscrimi- 
nating, unsparing condemnation. 

From these influences of nationality I do not hope to 
be wholly free, though at the same time I am neither 
conscious of any patriotic bias against the capital of 
France, nor of any anti-patriotic bias in its favor. I have 
been very familiarly acquainted with Paris for twenty- 
seven years, and know both its beauties and its defects. 
The only strong national prejudice against it which I 
still retain is a rooted prejudice in favor of the old Eng- 
lish system of living in separate houses as against the 
French system of living on flats. It may seem at first 
sight that this has very little to do with the artistic 
aspects of Paris, which will be the subject of the present 
series of papers ; but, in truth, the connection between 
them is very close. The magnificence of modern Pari- 
sian streets is almost entirely due to the flat system ; the 
apparent meanness of English towns is due to our sepa- 
rate houses. I am quite aware of this ; and I know at 
the same time that where land is expensive, as it must 
be in every great city, the flat system is the one which 
allows the widest and most spacious streets, and gives 



6 Paris. 

the most air and sunshine to the inhabitants. Still, 
while admitting the convenience of the arrangement, its 
reasonableness, and the architectural grandeur of the 
combinations that result from it, I am Englishman 
enough to prefer, in my heart of hearts, a quiet English 
house with a ground-floor and one upper storey, or two 
at the very utmost, to the most imposing and preten- 
tious pile of towering appartements that the skill of 
a French architect ever devised or the wealth of an 
American colony ever rented. I revisited the north of 
England towards the close of 1882, and remember 
thinking, at Burnley, that one of the clean little houses 
that are now built there for workpeople, each with its 
own independent entrance and ready access to the 
street, would be pleasanter to live in than an expensive 
appartement au quatrihne on one of the finest boulevards 
of Paris. This no doubt is an English prejudice ; but 
one cannot denationalize oneself altogether. 

With regard to personal as distinct from national 
prejudices, the only important one that I am conscious 
of is a strong dislike to such extension of size in towns 
as that which makes them rather regions covered with 
houses than creations complete in themselves. A city 
of small size (what a Londoner would call insignificant), 
well situated in beautiful scenery, with ready access to 
the country from all its streets, and itself so constructed 
that its principal edifices compose happily with the 
landscape, and adorn it, — this is my ideal of a town ; ^ 
an ideal not so far from a possible reality, but that there 
are actually some existing little cities in France and 



Introduction. ' 7 

Italy that respond to it. The complete opposite of this 
ideal is London, which is not a town, but a spreading 
and gathering of population, like irregular fungoid 
growths joining together by their edges till a great 
space is ultimately covered by them, while there seems 
to be no reason Avhy they should not spread indefinitely 
on every side. There is nothing, on the outskirts of 
London, of that pretty, sudden contrast between town 
and country which gives such charm to both when the 
real green country, with its refreshment of rural peace, 
comes close up to the gray walls of the city, and shades 
them with its trees and adorns them with its flowers ; 
when the citizen can be at his business in the heart of 
the city at sunset and in the quiet fields before the gold 
has faded from the evening sky. That time is past for 
Paris as for London ; but some names of places still 
remain to recall rural associations. St. Germam-des- 
Pres, now close to a noisy boulevard, was once an 
abbey-church among meadows; Notre Dame dcs Champs 
was really Our Lady of the Fields; and the Rue Neiive 
des Petits Champs, a new street in little fields. Prim- 
roses may once have been found in the Impasse des 
' Primevkres, and vines in the Impasse des Vigiies. The 
country came close up to the smaller Paris of the Mid- 
dle Ages, and round about it there were fortresses, mon- 
asteries, and villages, islanded in a sea of pasturage, 
corn, and vines. Wall after wall was found to be too 
narrow a boundary, till M. Thiers built the present for- 
tifications, which the municipal council, with the con- 
sent of the military authorities, are already disposed to 



8 Paris. 

demolish, except the detached forts. This continual 
expansion of Paris beyond its boundaries, this continual 
invasion of the surrounding country, has given to the 
city that ill-defined zone of cheap and hasty construc- 
tion which surrounds every growing town. There is no 
longer a complete Paris, that can be easily seen at once. 
Giffard's captive balloon gave the means of seeing the 
present Paris, which presented the appearance of a vast 
basin covered with houses that died away into the sur- 
rounding country, and were divided by a many-bridged 
river; but the balloon was wrecked by a tempest, and 
now it is only the adventurous free aeronauts who, as 
they drift about in the upper air at the wind's will, can 
see the great city of the Seine. 

It is a convenience to divide history into epochs, 
which we select to mark the accomplishment of great 
changes ; but this habit of arbitrary division conveys in 
one way a false impression to the mind. The changes 
seem complete when we speak inaccurately and gen- 
erally ; but if we look carefully and strictly into the mat- 
ter we shall find that every age has left its peculiar work 
unfinished, and has left it to be continued by the next 
age, which, in its own turn, has begun something else, 
and left that to be carried on by its successor. There 
appears to be no such thing as finality in the history of 
a great city ; and, indeed, we may conclude from what 
has been actually done by past generations, that there 
is no incentive to important public works so powerful 
as the continual appeal of half-executed projects. The 
stones of many a building call as loudly as if they could 



Introduction. 




OLD HOUSE WITH TOURELLE. 



really speak ; they call not only for care in their preser- 
vation, but for additions to make them look less forlorn. 
Sometimes too much is done ; mistakes are committed 



lo . Paris. 

that need correction, and new mistakes are made in try- 
ing to rectify old ones, or a certain thing is built that 
would have been complete in itself if it could only have 
been let alone ; but it was not big enough for subse- 
quent practical needs, and so additions were made 
which destroyed its proportion, as if the wings of an 
eagle were fastened to a sparrow-hawk. Only a very 
few buildings, either in Paris or any other modern city, 
have possessed the virtue of unity. 

We ourselves have witnessed one of the most com- 
plete transformations of Paris. We have seen the Paris 
of Louis-Philippe transformed into that of Napoleon 
III, ; but even this, the greatest change ever operated 
in so short a time, had been prepared for, as I shall 
demonstrate when we reach that portion of our subject, 
by architectural tendencies and practical necessities 
which had been seen and felt much earlier. A much 
more absolute distinction exists between Gothic Paris 
and the Paris of the Renaissance. There, indeed, was 
a radical change, right and necessary as preparing the 
way for modern life, but at the same time exceed- 
ingly destructive, and not by any means generally favor- 
able to grace or beauty in its beginnings. It would be 
easy to describe the Paris of Louis XI. in very eloquent 
language, by the simple process of bringing every 
beauty into brilliant relief and hiding every defect, and 
it would be not less easy to make it appear that the 
Paris of Louis XIV. was a heavy and expensive mis- 
take ; but we shall have no controversial purpose to 
answer in this book. The course of events by which a 



Introduction. 1 1 

beautiful and convenient modern city has replaced a pic- 
turesque mediaeval one, is full of interest to the student, 
but need not awaken in him any very deep sentiment of 
regret, unless it be for this or that particular building 
which he knows to have once stood where omnibuses 
are now running on the Boulevard, or cafes display 
their vulgar luxury close by. This is the way in which 
our loss is most effectually brought home to us. There 
is the Hotel de Cluny, for example, which has been pre- 
served almost by miracle down to the present time, and 
is now made as safe for the future, by legislative protec- 
tion, as any human work well can be. Go through that 
admirable dwelling, so charming in its variety, without* 
any violation of harmony, so unostentatious and yet so 
beautiful, so well adapted to the needs of honorable and 
peaceful human life, and then calculate how many fur- 
longs of monotonous modern houses in the Rue de 
Rivoli might possibly be accepted as an equivalent for 
it. The Hotel de Cluny is the best of the old houses 
now remaining, almost the only important one that is 
still anything better than a fragment ; but historical stu- 
dents go from site to site, where the best of the old 
dwellings used to be, and then, finding nothing equivalent 
in their places, they lament what seems to them a blank, 
uncompensated loss. The loss is seldom compensated 
for on the spot, or in anything of the same kind ; but 
there is a broader and more general compensation in 
the grandeur of the modern city. If Paris had been 
treated somewhat tenderly, as Bourges has been, if the 
mediaeval houses had been generally preserved, and 



1 2 Paris. 

consequently the mediaeval streets, the houses keeping 
their external appearance and being adapted to modern 
requirements by internal alterations only, then indeed 
the city would have been a pleasant place for the inves- 
tigations of the artist and the archaeologist; but com- 
munication would have been so difficult that the life-blood 
of a great and populous modern city could never have 
circulated through such narrow and frequently con- 
stricted arteries. Nor has the destruction been quite 
absolutely complete. Notre Dame and the Sainte 
Chapelle have been preserved at least as well as 
Westminster Abbey and the Temple Church, while the 
tower of St. Jacques is left standing, when the church 
itself is gone. The less important remains of the Middle 
Ages, a small house or a tourelle here and there, were 
rapidly disappearing in Meryon's time, and with few 
exceptions have vanished utterly since. 

In Victor Hugo's " Notre Dame de Paris," written in 
1830, after a long and brilliant description of Paris in 
the Middle Ages, there comes a prediction of evil omen 
which has happily not been realized. " Our fathers," he 
says, " had a Paris of stone ; our sons will have a Paris 
of plaster." 

"The Paris of the present day (1830) has no general charac- 
ter. It is a collection of specimens of different ages, and the 
finest have disappeared. The capital increases only in houses — 
and what houses ! At this rate there will be a new Paris every 
fifty years. And then the historical significance of its archi- 
tecture is effaced daily. Buildings of importance become rarer 
and rarer, and it seems as if we could see them gradually sink- 
ing — drowned in the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris 
of stone ; our sons will have a Paris of plaster." 




THE HOTEL DE CLUNY. 



Introduction. 1 3 

This city of plaster might have filled the whole space 
within the fortifications to-day if the railways had not 
brought stone so easily from a distance ; but by a happy 
coincidence the colossal building enterprises of Napoleon 
III. were not undertaken before the principal lines of 
railway had been constructed, and by their means, not 
stone only, but vast quantities of wood and other ma- 
terials were brought readily to hand. At the same 
time the feeling, which an enemy calls vanity and a 
friend self-respect, led the sovereign and the municipal 
authorities of that time to desire that the new Paris 
should be a credit to them, — one of the principal glo- 
ries of what was intended to be a very brilliant reign. 
The consequence has been the reverse of what Victor 
Hugo feared. The Paris of plaster was the capital of 
Charles X. and of Louis-Philippe. Miles and miles of 
new streets were driven through dense clusters of houses 
so slight and poor in construction that they only kept 
themselves from falling by leaning against each other, 
while they did not possess the slightest architectural 
merit. In the new streets the houses were built of 
stone, and the work was done to endure. Of this new 
stone Paris we shall have much to say in this volume. 
The greatest fault of it is a certain monotony; but 
this was especially the fault of the first attempts in 
the new style. 

During the later years of Napoleon III., and since his 
time, there has been more variety in Parisian street archi- 
tecture, though it is true that the variety is often rather 
in the invention of detail than in the conception of 



1 4 Paris. 

edifices. There are immense quantities of good orna- 
mental sculpture, by no means slavish in the copying of 
set types, but full of delicate fancy, and really of our own 
time, though deriving its origin from the best French 
Renaissance. In a word, there is really a living street 
architecture in Paris in which clever architects employ 
ingenious artists and highly trained craftsmen to work 
upon the best materials. What remains true in Victor 
Hugo's criticism is, that the great height of these mod- 
ern houses, and their enormous quantity, make public 
buildings seem as if they were drowned among them. 
All the churches in Paris, not excepting Notre Dame, 
have been diminished by gigantic modern house-build- 
ing; just as a great injury has been done to the National 
Gallery, in London, notwithstanding its very favorable 
site, by the neighborhood of the Grand Hotel. We 
remember the time when the Nelson Column used to 
appear unnecessarily high, but it is not an inch too high 
at present; and we all know what a deplorable effect 
has been produced upon the towers of Westminster 
Abbey by the tall new houses in their neighborhood. 
So the greater decorative enrichments of modern build- 
ings have often made an older edifice look poor, as 
Westminster Hall was externally annihilated by the 
panelled walls of the new palace, and the old Tuileries 
made to look poverty-stricken beside the massive orna- 
ments of the new Pavilion de Flore. Hence it is a 
most dangerous time for the public buildings in any 
city when the people are beginning to take a delight 
in lofty houses and palatial hotels. Nor is this danger 



Introduction. 1 5 

confined to cities only; an old building of moderate 
dimensions, even in the country, may be reduced to 
nothing by a large new one erected near enough to it 
for comparison. They tell me that a great hotel has 
been set up very near Kilchurn Castle. The only tol- 
erable thing near the moderately sized castles of the 
Highlands is a lowly thatched cottage, with green moss 
on its roof, and blue peat-reek rising through a hole 
in it. 



IT. 

LUTETIA. 

IT is curious that the sites of the most important cities 
in the old worid should generally have been deter- 
mined by the choice made by a barbarous tribe thou- 
sands of years ago, with a view to its own security, and 
that this choice made by barbarians should have settled 
the matter so irrevocably that succeeding generations 
have had to do the best they could with the same posi- 
tion, well chosen for the needs of its first occupants, but 
often ill chosen for the latest. The selection of Paris 
as the site of the future capital of France depended on 
the practical wisdom of some prehistoric savages, who 
found that islands in the river were the safest places to 
be had in that part of the country. There was one 
large island, and a few smaller ones, in the midst of the 
tract of country now occupied by Paris, and there is 
evidence that some prehistoric tribe used these islands 
for a protected dwelling-place. After them came the 
Gauls, with a far higher degree of civilization and a 
rather advanced military art, especially in defensive ar- 
rangements. The Gaulish oppidum was not what we 
understand by a city, even when the city is fortified ; it 
was simply a place of refuge, in some situation naturally 



Lutetia. 17 

difficult of access, either from steepness, as In hilly 
countries, or from bogs and water in more level ones. 
The Gauls preferred a steep hill to anything else as the 
site of one of their great forts ; but where they had not 
a hill high enough and steep enough for their purpose, 
they were glad of a piece of solid ground in the middle 
of a marsh, or an island in a river. The island on which 
Notre Dame is now situated appears to have answered 
their purpose, and for long afterwards its defensive 
value was of some consequence ; but I need hardly ob- 
serve that when Paris was besieged by the Germans in 
1870, it did not signify in the least whether the central 
part of the city was on an island or not. Paris has so 
immensely outgrown its first insular beginning, that its 
present military defences are a ring of forts far away 
out in the country on all sides. I am rather inclined to 
beheve that in this extension we may see a prototype of 
Great Britain, scarcely to be considered an island since 
her Colonial Empire has become so vast as to give her 
frontiers inside three continents. 

The numbers of bridges in Paris make the islands as 
much a part of the town as any other part, and indeed we 
are hardly sensible that they are islands at all. But not 
only was the Gaulish oppidum insular, the Gallo-Roman 
city of Lutetia was so too ; and there is every reason to 
believe that it presented rather a beautiful appearance 
as seen from the surrounding country. In Hoffbauer's 
valuable work on " Paris a travers les Ages," to which I 
am under great obligations for archaeological details 
not readily accessible elsewhere, there is a careful draw- 



1 8 Paris. 

ing of Lutetia as it must have appeared from the aque- 
duct of Arcueil, with Montmartre, then the Hill of Mars, 
in the distance. The first impression one receives is 
that, compared with mediaeval Paris, Lutetia must have 
had a strangely modern look ; but the fact is, that since 
the Renaissance we have got so thoroughly used to 
classic forms that we are really at home in them, and it 
is positively more natural for us to build (with certain 
modifications) like the ancient Romans than like our 
own mediaeval ancestors. The aqueduct of Arcueil in 
M. HofTbauer's drawing reminds one of a suburban rail- 
way viaduct ; the Roman villas among the trees in the 
valley are in outward appearance not very unlike many 
French and Italian houses of the present day; and if 
Lutetia on her island has an aspect rather unsatisfying 
to modern eyes, it is more because there are neither 
domes nor spires nor any lofty towers, than because 
the edifices themselves are contrary to our taste. 

The Gallo-Roman city of Lutetia was not absolutely 
confined to the island. That was the stronghold, but 
there were important buildings outside of it, especially 
to the southward. The stronghold on the island was not 
fortified in the early Roman time; a wall of defence 
was built round it only in the beginning of the fifth cen- 
tury after Christ. There were at least two great Roman 
palaces, one on the island where the Palace of Justice 
now is, and another on the mainland of vast dimensions, 
the west end of which was situated in what is now the 
garden of the Hotel de Cluny. That in the island had 
a sort of open gallery or colonnade on the river-side ; 



Lutetia. 1 9 

and there is curious evidence, in some of the columns 
which have been recovered, that the boatmen were 
allowed to make use of them to haul and fasten their 
craft, for near the bases we find deep grooves worn by 
the ropes. That this Roman palace contained large 
rooms was proved beyond a doubt when their founda- 
tions were laid bare during the modern alterations in 
the Palais de Justice. The discoverers were even fortu- 
nate enough to come upon painted decorations, a speci- 
men of which they were able to remove from the wall, 
and it is now preserved in the museum at the Hotel de 
Cluny. Little more than this is now known about the 
Roman palace on the island. As its site was used long 
afterwards for royal dwellings, the Roman building 
itself may have been preserved for a long time, and 
have undergone a long series of alterations before it 
was finally replaced by a Gothic one. There have been 
great changes in the island since Roman times. There 
were no buildings in Lutetia to the westward of the 
palace, as its gardens went to what was then the western 
extremity of the island. They are now covered by the 
Prefecture de Police. In the times of Lutetia, and for 
centuries afterwards, the island came to an end in what 
is now the widest part of the Place Dauphine, and there 
were two smaller islands side by side beyond that, 
which have since been joined to the large one. The 
narrow end of the Place Dauphine is on one of these 
islands, and the houses on the left (as you look down 
the river) are partly built upon the other. There was 
also a long, narrow strip of an island on the left side of 



20 Paris. 

the larger one, and the narrow channel which isolated 
this strip of land has since been filled up, so that the 
sreat island has annexed three islets in all. It has also 
been considerably enlarged by quays built out into the 
river, especially at the east end, where much ground 
has been gained towards the Pont de I'Archeveche and 
the Pont St. Louis. The south side of Notre Dame is 
built upon the Roman wall, which it follows irregularly. 
The Forum is supposed to have occupied ground under 
the present barracks of the Republican Guard. Lutetia 
had one bridge over the narrow arm of the Seine, and 
another over the wider, but that was all. At present 
the island is connected with the mainland by ten bridges, 
if you count the Pont Neuf as two, because it crosses 
the two arms of the river. 

Nobody knows who built the great palace to the 
south which bears the name of the Emperor Julian, and 
has long been called Les Thermes. Some important 
remains of this are still visible and are likely to be pre- 
served, being classed as historical monuments. The 
great hall, which every visitor will remember, and which 
used to be the frigidarium of the baths, is one of the 
most impressive Roman remains still to be seen out of 
Italy. It is extremely plain, except the sculptured 
prows of vessels from which the vault springs ; but in 
Roman times its broad and simple surfaces of wall and 
vault would no doubt be covered with stucco and deco- 
rated with some kind of mural painting, and there must 
have been a marble floor. It is curious that we who 
erect much larger buildings (though the size of this is 






■s J?isi-^ 




THE FRIGIDARIUM OF THE ROMAN BATHS, CALLED LES THERMES. 



LtUetia. 



21 



considerable) should be, as we are, so deeply impressed 
by the power and magificence of the ancient Romans 
when we enter it ; but this may be attributed to its an- 
tiquity. An Englishman first coming to it from England 
feels as an American may feel in a mediaeval cathedral ; 
all the buildings he has ever entered are things of yes- 
terday in comparison with this. There is something, 
too, which commands our admiration in the resistance 
to ill usage as well as to mere time. The place has 
been stripped bare. It has even been made to carry a 
garden on the top of it, and has been used as a store- 
house for merchandise; yet still it stands, firm and 
strong, and sure to outlast all the delicate Gothic chap- 
els in France unless they were constantly repaired. 
The other remains of the baths, without being so well 
preserved as the great frigidarium, are still sufficiently 
so to permit detailed recognition. The hot and cold 
baths, the swimming-bath, the aqueduct, the place for 
the heating apparatus, are all visible. It is believed 
that their preservation was due for a long time to the 
persistence of Roman customs among the Christianized 
Gauls, including of course the luxurious and cleanly 
custom of bathing according to the rules of art. 

Besides what remains of the baths, three rooms 
belonging to the ancient palace are still in existence, 
and are used as part of the Cluny Museum. The lost 
vaults of the two larger ones have been replaced by 
modern roofs, but the small room is still entire. The 
foundations of a part of the Roman palace still exist 
under the Hotel de Cluny. 



22 Paris. 

" An inscription," says M. Lenoir, "placed in the courtyard of 
the old convent of the Mathurins commemorated the discovery 
of Roman remains in continuation of those under the Hotel de 
Cluny, and marked their extent almost to the monastery. On 
the Rue des Mathurins the discoveries have been extensive, and 
include — i, a great room twelve metres square, which has lost 
its vault (this is annexed to the Hotel de Cluny) ; 2, the under- 
structure of two great rooms, fifteen metres by eight, running 
parallel from north to south ; 3, a larger room than any of 
these, measuring twenty-four metres by twelve. Its northern ex- 
tremity (between two buildings which still exist) is ended by a 
curved wall like that of a Roman basilica. Possibly it may be 
what remains of the consistorium mentioned by Ammianus 
Marcellinus." 

It is beyond the province of this little work to follow 
out archaeological discoveries in minute detail, but 
enough has been said to show that the southern palace 
was a building of great importance. It is believed to 
have been destroyed by the Normans in the ninth 
century. 

Like other great cities of Roman Gaul, Lutetia had 
her amphitheatre. The ruins of it remained down to 
the twelfth century, or were mentioned at that time. 
Since then there survived a vague tradition about Its 
locality, but all doubts were set at rest when in 1869 an 
important new street was cut on the south side of Paris, 
the street now called the Rue Monge. The workmen 
laid bare half the foundations of the amphitheatre, and 
the other half still remains under the modern houses. 
Much to the grief of the antiquaries, that half of the 
amphitheatre which was exposed to view had to be 



LMtetia. 23 

destroyed to make way for the modern improvements.^ 
From the antiquarian point of view such regrets are 
quite intelHgible, but from that of art the loss is im- 
perceptible, as the remains were too low to have any 
architectural effect. Had the amphitheatre been as 
well preserved as that of Nimes, it would have been an 
object of great interest, and a most valuable contrast to 
the monotony of modern streets. There is some rea- 
son to believe that the amphitheatre was so arranged 
that it might serve also as a theatre, and its western 
seats would be supported by the rising ground of the 
hill Lucotitius, that on which the Pantheon is now situ- 
ated, as the seats of the theatre at Augustodunum were 
supported by the hill now occupied by the little semi- 
nary. In the imaginary view of Lutetia by the archi- 
tect Hoffbauer the upper portion of the amphitheatre 
is visible on the left bank of the Seine, not very far 
above the upper extremity of the great island. Like 
the amphitheatre of Augustodunum, it would be almost 
out in the country. 

Very little is known about the temples. Unlike 
Athens, Rome, Vienne, Nimes, and a few other cities 
of great antiquity, Lutetia has not left a single temple 
standing, nor have we authentic data from which to 
construct a drawing of any temple that once existed. 
We know that there were two temples on Montmartre, 
one dedicated to Mars, the other to Mercury. A great 
piece of wall belonging to the latter existed so late as 

1 The last news is that the other half of the amphitheatre is in dan- 
ger of sharing the same fate. 



24 Paris. 

1618, when it was blown down by a tempestuous wind, 
and " the idol reduced to powder." All that we know 
about its shape is that it was " a great ruinous piece of 
wall." It is represented as such in the distance of a 
picture painted in the fifteenth century for the Abbot 
of St. Germain des Pr6s, and now in the Musee des 
Monuments Frangais. 

Still, if we have not accurate data concerning the 
temples of Lutetia, we have clear evidence in the quan- 
tity of rich architectural fragments which the disturbed 
soil of Paris has yielded up that the place contained 
buildings of considerable magnificence, as did the other 
great Gallo-Roman cities. Lutetia seems so remote 
from us that we hardly realize its existence. It is more 
like a poetical dream for us than that which was once a 
reality. This is due in part to the total abandonment 
of the name, and in part to the nearly total effacement 
of all material vestiges. The case may be understood 
in a moment by supposing a similar effacement at 
Rome. Suppose that the Coliseum had simply dis- 
appeared long ago, that every vestige of temple, palace, 
forum, triumphal arch, monumental column, and an- 
cient wall, had also vanished; finally, imagine a new 
city where Rome had been, but so big as to cover its 
environs, and that this new city, instead of being called 
Roma by the Italians, was called, let us say, Avezzano 
or Pescino, and had itself a more famous history than 
any other modern town, — what would be the conse- 
quence? Simply, that the sites of old Rome, instead 
of being familiar to all tourists, would be a matter of 



Lutetia, 25 

dubious speculation for melancholy-minded archaeolo- 
gists, who would continually deplore its disappearance, 
and that the new city would go on with its business just 
as if Roma had never existed. Such has been the fate 
of Lutetia, once a fair city, with busy commerce by 
land and water, with palaces, villas, aqueducts, and 
baths, now a dream as remote from us as Troy, the 
only difYerence being that, as we go down the Seine and 
pass the most historical of her islands, we know that 
once Lutetia was there. 

In M. Hoffbauer's drawing of Lutetia the city is 
prudently placed at a distance, while the aqueduct of 
Arcueil (of which the details are known) occupies most 
of the foreground. We have not ventured to attempt a 
restoration of Lutetia seen near, so we give, instead, the 
view of the island as it is to-day, seen from the windows 
of the Louvre, certainly one of the finest urban views in 
the world. It has already been explained in this chap- 
ter that the great island has been lengthened westwards, 
that is, towards the foreground of the etching, by the 
annexation of two small islands, which in ancient times 
were separated from it by narrow channels. The elon- 
gated island now finishes prettily with a clump of trees, 
behind which the reader may recognize the equestrian 
statue of Henry IV. on its pedestal. Immediately in 
front of the statue are two massive blocks of houses, 
built in Henry's time, and remarkable for their heaped- 
up, picturesque, and richly varied roofs, which have 
often been sketched by Parisian artists. These houses 



26 Paris. 

are at the narrow end of the Place Dauphine, and the 
space between them used to be its only entrance and 
exit. The bridge in the foreground (I need hardly 
observe) is the Pont Neuf, and after it, as we look up 
the river on the broad arm, we see in succession the 
Ponts au Change, Notre Dame, d'Arcole, and Louis- 
Philippe. Near the Pont au Change are the mediaeval 
towers of the Palace of Justice, and that is the place 
where the Gallo-Roman boatmen, the Nmttae Parisi- 
aci, used to fasten their barges to the colonnade of 
the Roman palace. The principal existing beauties of 
the island, as seen from the western extremity, are the 
towers of Notre Dame and the elegant spire of the 
Sainte Chapelle. The work of modern times has not 
been by any means entirely hostile to its beauty; for 
if the island has lost something in the vanished Roman 
palace and other buildings, it has gained immensely 
in recent times by its beautiful bridges and quays. 
The view was blocked in the Middle Ages by the 
houses upon the bridges. We shall see later how su- 
perior the modern bridge is to the mediaeval one, and 
what an incalculable gain the new kind of bridge has 
been to city views. Let us, however, always exempt 
from praise the modern railway pontifex, who thinks 
nothing of spoiling a great capital with his cast-iron 
abomJnations. To understand the injury that may be 
done by them, the reader has only to imagine one of them 
in the place of the Pont Neuf or the Pont au Change. 
It has been said that Lutetia was walled late (about 



Lutetia. 27 

the close of the fourth century), and this first defence 
lasted a considerable time. It is believed that it was 
still in existence (probably after considerable repairs) 
in the time of Charles the Bald, and that ruler strength- 
ened it by wooden towers, — one at the western end of 
the city, called la tour du Palais, and the two others at 
the ends of the bridges, where they abutted on the 
mainland. To save the reader the trouble of a refer- 
ence, we may add that Charles the Bald reigned from 
840 to 877. After this we know very little about the for- 
tifications till the reign of Louis VI. (1108-1137). That 
monarch built two gateways in stone to defend the ac- 
cess to the two bridges from the mainland to the island, 
probably on or near the sites where the wooden towers 
of Charles the Bald had been, and he called these Le 
Grand Chdtelet and Le Petit Ckdtelet, names which the 
reader is requested to remember, as they are of much 
importance in the topography of Paris. Etymologi- 
cally, chdtelet is exactly the same word as chalet, and 
merely means a small castle; but by one of those dis- 
tinctions which custom creates between words of like 
origin, chatelet means a small strong castle, a work of 
fortification, while chalet only means the diminutive of 
a fine house. The present reminders of the Grand 
Chatelet in Paris are the Place and the Theatre du 
Chatelet. So little warlike is its present aspect, that 
the pretty square has its own theatre on its western side, 
and the Theatre Lyrique on its eastern, and between the 
two is a fountain with a column opposite an elegant 
undefended bridge. The extremely peaceful aspect of 



28 Paris. 

things inside Paris tempts us to forget that the town is 
still a fortress, the only difference being that its defen- 
sive castles are now called forts, and are at a distance 
in the country. 

The Grand Chatelet had no doubt a fine imposing 
aspect when first built, with its lofty conical-shaped 
towers and gloomy portal. Our engraving shows it as 
it still existed, injured both by diminution and addition, 
in the middle of the seventeenth century. The reader 
will easily see how little the original military architec- 
ture had been respected. In the structure between 
the towers, which ends as a belfry, were the arms of 
Louis XII. As the work of Louis VI. had been so little 
respected, the complete destruction of it in 1802 need 
not awaken in us any very profound regret.^ 

The Gallo-Roman wall is counted by French antiqua- 
ries as the first wall, — la premiere enceinte. It is rather 
important to remember the order of the successive rings 
of wall that enclosed Paris as it grew larger, for they 
constantly recur in the topography of the place. The 
second wall was that of Louis VI., the builder of the 
two Chatelets ; but the learned do not seem to know 
very much about this wall positively. They know, how- 
ever, that it included much of the town which had 
spread out of the island, and therefore that it was the 
first clear definition of mediaeval Paris as distinguished 
from the antique Lutetla. 

1 The Petit Chatelet was a simpler building than the other, — a sort of 
donjon tower, with bartizans. We may have to recur to it on a future 
occasion. It was used as a prison. The Grand Chatelet was at one 
time the Provost's residence, and it became a court of justice. 



Lutetia. 29 

The third wall was that of Philippe-Auguste, and of 
this we know a great deal, — almost as much as if we 
had actually seen it. That great and energetic sover- 
eign was as enterprising in building as in politics, and the 
same instinct which made him enlarge and strengthen 
.his kingdom led him at the same time to enlarge and 
strengthen his capital. He boldly included in his new 
wall not only existing streets that lay outside that of 
Louis VI., but also great spaces of garden-ground, of 
vineyards, and even fields, which he foresaw would be 
covered with houses in course of time. His wall was 
a thoroughly good and substantial piece of work, and 
handsome, too, in the simple beauty of mediaeval mili- 
tary architecture, which, though not so rich and elegant 
as the ecclesiastical or domestic architecture of the 
same period, was still incomparably superior in appear- 
ance to the ugly military works of our own time. The 
enceinte de PJiilippe-Augiiste consisted of two walls faced 
with ashlar, one facing towards the country, the other 
towards Paris, and the space between them was filled 
with cemented rubble, of which were also the founda- 
tions. The wall was three metres thick and nine high, 
including the parapet, which was embattled ; and at in- 
tervals of about seventy metres there were round tow- 
ers half buried in the wall, yet projecting from it about 
two yards : these were at first covered with conical 
roofs, but they were afterwards embattled like the para- 
pet. I am not sure about their height, but suppose it 
to have been thirteen or fourteen metres to the eaves of 
the conical roof. At longer intervals were large gates, 



30 . Paris. 

flanked by towers of more important size, and these 
were fifteen or sixteen metres high. 

On the south side of the river the wall of Philippe- 
Auguste, which was interrupted by the Seine (there 
being no fortified bridge in continuation of it), started 
from the Tour de Nesle, which remained long after the wall 
itself had disappeared, — long enough indeed to be drawn 
and etched by Callot. This famous Tour de Nesle was 
originally called after Philippe Hamelin, a provost of 
Paris, and the name was afterwards changed when it 
belonged to Amaury de Nesle. It is one of the most 
important points in Parisian topography, and is easily 
remembered in connection with Callot's etchings and 
other prints. It is remembered also in connection with 
the terrible legend of a vicious queen (Jeanne de Bour- 
gogne, wife of Philippe le Long), who is said to have en- 
ticed handsome youths into the tower and then had 
them cast into the Seine before daybreak that they 
might tell no tales.^ We do not see the tower in 
Callot's representations of it quite as it was originally 
built. At first it is believed to have had a conical roof, 
and the turret staircase was added by Charles V. 

The exact situation of the Tour de Nesle was where 
the eastern or right wing of the Institute stands at the 
present day. 

1 This is one o£ the best-known popular legends in France, being at 
the same time romantic and horrible, and therefore exactly suited to the 
popular taste ; but I have very little faith in the truth of it, because, as 
a general rule, the water was too shallow at the foot of the tower for 
such deeds to pass unperceived. If done at all, it could only be when 
the Seine was in flood. 



Lutetia. 31 

The reader is now requested to transport himself in 
imagination across the river till he is in the courtyard 
of what is now the old Louvre, the great square court- 
yard of the palace. Let him stand, in imagination, pre- 
cisely in the very centre of that square and look 
southward, or towards the Seine. If the past could rise 
like a ghost he would see a phantom wall crossing the 
courtyard from north to south just at his left hand, and 
there would be one of its round towers just within the 
court on the north side of it near to the present en- 
trance from the Rue de Rivoli. That would be the wall 
of Philippe-Auguste exactly in its old situation. Just 
at the same spectator's right hand would be one of the 
corner towers of the Castle of the Louvre that Philippe- 
Auguste erected. It was a square castle with a court- 
yard in the middle of it, and in the court there stood a 
great keep or donjon. The castle cannot have been of 
very vast dimensions, as it occupied not quite one quar- 
ter of the present square,- including the site of the pres- 
ent building, and not simply the open space. It was, 
however, a strong place according to the military re- 
quirements, of the time, and is not to be confounded, 
in its origin, with the palatial associations that have 
since gathered round the word "Louvre." It began 
by being purely and simply a fortress, and a part of 
the defensive arrangements made by Philippe-Auguste. 
Afterwards Charles V. heightened and embellished it, 
opened windows in its grim walls, and turned it into an 
agreeable royal residence. 

Now, if the reader will suppose that he is walking 



32 Paris. 

from the centre of the Louvre Square straight towards 
the river, he will just pass on his left hand, before com- 
ing to the present quay, the site of an old tower belong- 
ing to the fortifications of Philippe-Auguste, and which 
used to be called La Tour qui fait le Coin. That tower 
may be seen still in old drawings, and it stood exactly 
opposite to the Tour de Nesle. A chain was carried 
across the Seine there to bar the passage. 

These archaeological details may not appear at first 
sight to belong very closely to our subject, which is the 
aspect of Paris, for these towers and the entire wall of 
Philippe-Auguste have long since been swept away; 
but the Paris of old engravings is not to be understood 
at all without some knowledge of the past, and nothing 
adds so much to the interest of the present ground as 
the knowledge of what stood there formerly. The old 
court of the Louvre is a wonderful and magnificent en- 
closure, but the interest of it is much augmented when 
we know that a strong mediaeval castle once stood 
there, and that the city wall once traversed the same 
space. The Institute is a building of some architec- 
tural merit, with many noble intellectual associations ; 
but any visitor to Paris who is cultivated enough to care 
about such associations as the present building pos- 
sesses will probably have enough of the historic sense to 
care about the Tour de Nesle, and interest enough in 
art to know that Callot drew it. The past is interesting 
also for its wonderful influence in determining the sites 
of present buildings, often in a way which nobody 
would ever imagine. The visitor to Paris who knows 



Lutetia. 33 

absolutely nothing about its history is likely to im- 
agine, when he sees the Louvre, that the site on which he 
finds a picture-gallery was selected for the convenient 
exhibition of art-treasures ; whereas the truth is that it 
was first chosen for military reasons, when a fortress 
was built just outside the walls of Paris, yet near the 
river, and that the fortress became a royal residence, 
which in its turn became a national art-gallery by a 
series of transformations that we have still to follow. 
It is well to remember what has been ; but there is little 
reason to regret the disappearance of such relics as the 
Tour de Nesle and the Tour qui fait le Coin. We have 
only to see them in drawings of their old age to per- 
ceive how incongruous and out-of-place they had be- 
come. The present Louvre is magnificent enough to 
deserve that the past should be sacrificed to it. Let 
the past be sacrificed then, but not forgotten. 



III. 

A VOYAGE ROUND THE ISLAND. 

IT is wonderful how much the interest of a piece of 
land is augmented by the simple fact of its being 
surrounded with water. The reason probably is, that 
the isolation of the land gives it unity and limits, which 
are the first conditions necessary to every work in the 
fine arts. Our own faculties are so limited that the 
infinite always disconcerts them ; but give us something 
so defined that we can see its boundaries, and we have 
the comfortable sensation that perhaps we may under- 
stand what lies within them. This feeling about islands 
is naturally in inverse ratio to their size. Australia, 
though strictly just as much an island as the Isle of 
Man, is never spoken of as an island at all, and we do 
not think of it as one. The two Americas are one 
island, or two peninsulas ; but we call them a continent. 
Even Great Britain is too large for us to feel its insu- 
larity unless we think about it. The perfection of an 
island is to be just big enough for some variety of hill 
and dale, and yet so little that the whole circumference 
of it can be seen from some elevated point. 

There are many such spots of earth in the world, of 
great natural beauty, in lakes, rivers, and seas ; but if 



A Voyage round the Island. 35 

we except the half-artificial islets on which Venice is 
built, there is not an island anywhere to be compared 
for human interest to that which is crowned w:ith the 
towers of Notre Dame and the spire of the Sainte Cha- 
pelle. What may have been its natural beauty in pre- 
historic times we can only guess. It has no hill, no 
rock, like that at Decize in the Loire. Probably it was 
never anything better than a flat piece of land adorned 
with groups of trees and reflecting itself, like hundreds 
of other river islands, in the stream that washed and 
undermined its banks. Man took possession of it, and 
gave it an interest surpassing that of rocks and foliage. 
In itself it is now nothing but a flat area, defended from 
the destructive action of the water by well-built quays ; 
but every inch of it has its history, and besides this the 
island has an architectural interest of a peculiar kind, for 
the work that has been done in it in past ages, and for 
the remarkable changes that have been made in it both 
in modern and in older times. 

I must now ask the reader to accompany me in a 
boat voyage round this famous little island, — a slow 
voyage, with many pauses, as different as possible from 
a trip in one of the swift little steamers that dart so 
frequently under the bridges. They are not for us. 
Neither do we require a swift and elegant rowing boat, 
such as they build now down at Asnieres. Anything 
that will float and be steady is good enough for us ; but 
we require an experienced marinier de la Seine (a worthy 
successor of the ancient Nautae Parisiact) to look to 
our safety in the currents, for we shall be far too much 



36 Paris. 

occupied with other matters to concern ourselves about 
the details of navigation. 

We will go down the broad arm of the Seine first, if 
you please, and then ascend the narrow one ; and we 
will start from the Pont Sully, which goes from the 
Quai de la Tournelle across the eastern corner of the 
Island of St. Louis, straight in the direction of the Bas- 
tille, which the pedestrian soon reaches by the Boule- 
vard Henri IV. Before leaving the Pont Sully, we may 
observe that this spot where the Boulevard St. Germain 
joins the Quai de la Tournelle is of considerable impor- 
tance in the historical topography of Paris, because the 
Porte St. Bernard was just precisely there ; and not 
only was that gate in the original wall of Philippe- 
Auguste, but it was preserved, after undergoing a trans- 
formation, till the comparatively recent times of Louis 
XVI. In the days of Louis XIV. the old Gothic gate 
was turned into a classical arch of triumph in honor of 
the great king; but a piece of the old wall and two 
towers were left intact on the side towards the Seine, 
and that which stood close to the water was the Tour- 
nelle itself, from which the present quay takes its name. 
For various reasons it is one of the most important 
points in Paris. In the Middle Ages this tower was 
connected by a chain with one that stood opposite to it 
on the island of St. Louis, while on the land side the 
wall which started from the Tournelle in a southerly 
direction, and turned westward just above where the 
Pantheon now stands, was the boundary of the great 
mediaeval university of Paris. What is now called the 



A Voyage round the Island. 37 

Island of St. Louis was in the fifteenth century two isl- 
ands ; the one to the east being called l" He aiix Vaches, 
and that to the west I' He Notre Dame. Farther east, and 
separated from the He aux Vaches by a narrow channel, 
and by one still narrower from the north shore of the 
Seine, was another island, called Vile des Javiazix. This 
was called Vile Louvier in the eighteenth century, and 
was used as a storage ground for firewood ; but the chan- 
nel has now been filled up and the island annexed to the 
mainland. The Boulevard Henri IV. and three smaller 
streets cross what was once flowing water. As to the 
present condition of the He St. Louis, it need not detain 
us. The ground is covered with the usual tall, well- 
built, modern Parisian houses, and connected with other 
parts of Paris by seven bridges, if you count the Pont 
Sully as two, which it really is. The island is said to be 
an agreeable place of residence for its almost Venetian 
quiet, and for the fine views from many of its windows. 
Altogether it has now a very highly civilized appear- 
ance ; yet one cannot help regretting the fifteenth cen- 
tury, when there was only a bit of fortress wall upon it, 
with towers, and a few trees, and when seventeen towers 
could be counted along the north bank of the Seine, and 
turning up to the great fortress, — the Bastille, — while 
within the space so enclosed arose many a turret and 
spire whereof there are none remaining. 

The Isle of St. Louis — which in the Middle Ages had 
been so little dealt with by human art that the animals 
upon it could get to the water all round, except where 
the banks were undermined by the current — is now so 



38 Paris. 

surrounded with quays that the horses in the stables 
could never approach the water at all unless access 
were made for them artificially. This is one of those 
numerous cases in which civilization first takes away a 
natural convenience and then restores it in its own 
fashion. Frenchmen are very fond of bathing their 
horses in the fine weather; you may see them doing 
it in all the rivers of France, as artists are well aware. 
Nothing that men and animals are ever engaged in 
together offers prettier and more unexpected effects 
of grouping and active movement, while the rippling 
of the water itself against the animals' bodies affords 
ample variety of reflection. The view from the river 
here has been much diminished in picturesque interest 
by the gradual and now almost complete victory of 
modern neatness in the works of the house-architect 
and the engineer, the only very obvious gain being the 
distant dome of the Pantheon. Notwithstanding the loss 
of all the military mediaeval towers, such as the Tour- 
nelle on the left bank, the Tour Loriaux on the lie St. 
Louis, and many others, we have one consolation which 
makes us easily forget them all. Notre Dame is still 
erect on the greater island, the glory of the river as 
you come down through the Pont de la Tournelle, so 
that you can hardly take your eye off it as the motion 
of your boat changes for you the intricate perspective 
of tower and spire and flying buttress. There is many 
a fine river-scene in France in which natural beauty 
is mingled with some remnant of noble architecture. 
Here the natural beauty is limited to sky and water, 



A Voyage round the Island. 39 

and to the trees in the space at the upper end of the 
island, now called the Jardin de VArcheveche ; but it is 
a scene which nothing spoils, and which has a wonder- 
ful charm and grandeur at certain times, especially in 
the splendor of sunset. Notre Dame looks imposing 
from every side ; but there is no view of the buildine 
quite so impressive as that which includes the apse, 
with its long, light, flying buttresses in their varied 
degrees of foreshortening. 

This illustration shows the cathedral as it appears 
from the garden itself; but, like all large edifices, it is 
much more imposing from some distance, and looks 
best in the well-known view from the left bank of 
the Seine that has been so often drawn, painted, and 
engraved, and that vi^as the subject of one of Meryon's 
most famous etchings. 

The contrast between the two islands of St. Louis 
and La Cite is in nothing more remarkable than in 
the antiquity of the human life upon them. Here the 
reader must be requested to give his special attention 
for one moment to one of those points which are the 
perpetual confusion of the careless and unobservant. 
When the careless reader meets with the He Notre Dame 
in the history of Paris, he inevitably imagines that it 
is the island on which Notre Dame is built; whereas 
it was the mediaeval name for the more southerly of 
the two islands, now united into one under the name 
of St. Louis; and what is most curious and remarkable 
is, that although the island of the city on which Notre 
Dame is situated was peopled in the time of the 



40 Paris. 

Romans, and covered with a most dense population 
in the Middle Ages, the island called after Notre Dame 
was waste land until the seventeenth century. This 
accounts for the strange fact that there never was a 
_ mediaeval bridge from one island to the other, though 
they are so near that a bridge seems inevitable. The 
distance is only sixty-five metres, and it is now spanned 
by a single arch. In the seventeenth century there was 
a wooden bridge from the southern extremity of the 
He St. Louis (the present Pont St. Louis is higher 
up), and this wooden structure has a strange history 
connected with what was called the Cloister of Notre 
Dame. This was not what we are accustomed to call 
a cloister, but a sort of ecclesiastical village composed 
of thirty-seven houses, each having its own garden, 
and the whole being defended by a wall. The clois- 
ter was situated in the Island of the City, between 
Notre Dame and the channel now crossed by the 
Pont St. Louis, It appears that the clergy who lived 
in it enjoyed such delightful quiet amid their gar- 
dens that they could not endure the idea of a bridge 
with its noisy traffic ; so in order to spare the cloister 
the bridge was made of a very peculiar form. First 
it crossed the channel at such an angle as to make it 
much longer than necessary; and then, when it had 
got near what is now the Quai Napoleon, it ran parallel 
with the shore of the island for some distance before 
landing. This wooden bridge is known in history as the 
Pont Rouge, because it was painted with red lead. 
Next we come to the Pont d'Arcole, which has 




GARDEN EAST OF NOTRE DAME. 



A Voyage round the Island. 4 1 

hardly any history.^ It is in one arch, and a Hght 
and clever piece of modern engineering. It connects 
the Rue d'Arcole, which leads to the west front of 
Notre Dame, with that part of the north shore where 
the Hotel de Ville is situated; consequently in modern 
Paris there are few points of greater architectural in- 
terest. Still, so far as the variety and abundance of 
picturesque material is concerned, this part of Paris 
has suffered even more than many others by modern 
improvements. It was once extremely populous. In 
the Middle Ages it was a labyrinth of narrow streets, 
with tall gabled houses, all along the bank of the 
river. Even in the last century there still subsisted 
a number of small churches and tortuous streets, many 
of which bore the old names, and remnants of them 
may still be remembered. The improvements, begun 
under the reign of Napoleon III., and carried out under 

1 I quote the following passage in a letter from my old friend William 
Wyld, the distinguished painter, as it adds to the interest of this bridge : 
" Touching the Pont d'Arcole of which you say, I think, that there is 
'hardly any history,' I will tell you a little anecdote. In 1830 I was an 
eye-witness to much hard fighting across that bridge (which was then but 
a small suspension passerelle for foot-passengers only), and saw there 
many a tall fellow laid low (I was on the quay of the Isle St. Louis). I 
think the bridge was then called the Pont de F Hotel de Ville, — but during 
the hottest of the fight a youth dashed sword in hand on to the bridge 
crying out, ^Je ni'appelle d''Arcole!' . . . Whether he escaped or not I don't 
know, but his name was given to the bridge without any allusion to that 
in Italy on which Napoleon I. carried the flag of the Republic amid a 
shower of bullets." According to Joanne's Guide, the youth was killed 
upon the bridge. Certainly nothing was subsequently heard of him ; and 
so by a single exclamation joined to an act of courage he won lasting 
fame, slightly obscured only by the confusion between his name and that 
of a bridge in Italy. Joanne gives his name as " Arcole," without the 
particle. 



42 Paris. 

the Republic, have cleared away all these, and substi- 
tuted for them broad streets, enormous public buildings, 
and an extensive open space. The result has been a 
simplification not unfavorable to the effect of magnifi- 
cence, but very destructive of the picturesque, because 
the picturesque requires the variety of many unex- 
pected details. The pyramids of Egypt are grand, 
but .not picturesque; the streets in old Cairo were 
picturesque in the extreme. The new Hotel Dieu, 
which has one front to the Seine and another on 
the open space in front of Notre Dame, is so vast 
that the site of it covers nearly three times the extent 
of ground occupied by the cathedral. On the site of 
this single building there used to be three churches and 
part of a fourth, and no less than eleven streets ! ^ 

Another modern taste besides that for extensive 
public buildings has been extremely destructive of. 
houses. Throughout the Middle Ages, and even 
down to comparatively recent times, it was consid- 
ered a wise economy of space to cover bridges with 
houses ; and that to such a degree that instead of a 

1 As some of these have a certain degree of historical interest, 
I give the names of them in a note. The churches were those of St. 
Landry, St. Denis de la Chartre, La Madeleine, and part of St. Pierre 
aux Boeufs. The streets were Rue Basse des Ursins, Rue Haute des 
Ursins, Rue du Haut Moulin, Rue des Marmousets (celebrated for tlie 
pastry-cook who in the Middle Ages made pies of human flesh, and 
etched by Lalanne before its demolition), Rue du Chevet St. Landry, 
Rue St. Pierre aux Boeufs, Rue Cocatrix, Rue de Perpignan, Rue des Trois 
Canettes, Rue de la Licorne. This list may serve to give the reader some 
faint idea of the enormous effacement of old Paris which has been 
necessary to make room for the gigantic modern public buildings, all 
this being sacrificed to a single hospital. 



A Voyage round the Island. 43 

broad road over the bridge with open views on both 
sides of it, the people of those days had the advantage 
(as it must have seemed to them) of getting across the 
water through a narrow street without any views at 
all, but with plenty of delightful little shops. The old 
notion of a bridge was to have it as much as possible 
like the present passages of Paris, such as the Passage 
Jouffroy, the Passage des Panoramas, etc. It may be 
supposed that our ancestors thought a bridge without 
houses bleak and uncomfortable, as the passengers 
over it would be unpleasantly exposed to the draught 
of wind that generally blows up or down a river. 
Their arrangement gave no view, but it gave a sheltered 
lounge, with plenty to see in the shop-windows. A 
curious consequence of it, which scarcely strikes us 
until we reflect a little, was that not only were the 
passages deprived of a view on the river, but even from 
the windows of the houses themselves very little was 
to be seen, as the next bridge always blocked the view, 
so that when the bridges were near together the houses 
on them and on the banks of the river made a sort of 
square with an enclosed area of water ; and the river 
was little better than a succession of such squares. 
We may be severe on our own times for some errors 
of taste, but surely in our treatment of rivers we have 
reason on our side. The Middle Ages had nothing 
to show like the quays and bridges of modern Paris. 
There was not a single spot in the Paris of Philippe- 
Auguste from which a view could be had up and down 
the river like the view from the modern bridges and 



44 Paris. 

quays. Old Paris had a thousand picturesque bits, 
but it had no distances. 

The Pont Notre Dame is that which joins the present 
Rue de la Cite, which is on the island, to the Quai de 
Gevres on the right bank of the Seine. It is one of the 
most interesting bridges in Paris. I have not space to 
give the history of the earlier bridges, and the reader 
might not care to follow such archaeological details ; 
but we cannot pass in silence the wonderful catastrophe 
of October 25, 1499, when the bridge fell into the 
Seine with all the houses upon it. The year previous 
some carpenters had noticed the rotten condition of the 
piles, and gave ample warning; but this was disregarded 
till at length a master carpenter went to one of the au- 
thorities, the " lieutenant-criminal " Papillon, and told 
him that the catastrophe was imminent. By order of 
a court then sitting (at seven o'clock in the morning) 
Papillon went and gave notice to the inhabitants and 
closed the bridge to the public. The dwellers on the 
bridge tried to remove their goods (a great piece of 
labor as they were all shopkeepers), but could not 
efifect this before the entire structure fell into the river 
with a fearful noise, and amid such a cloud of dust 
that nothing could be seen. It is difficult to imagine 
anything more terrible except an earthquake. In the 
midst of the confusion some lives were strangely pre- 
served. A porter with a burden of arrows on his back 
was thrown into the river and simply swam to the side. 
A man in one of the houses seeing a fissure yawn be- 
neath him jumped out of window and also saved him- 




PORT NOTRE DAME, i8tH CENTURY. 



A Voyage round the Island. 45 

self by swimming. But the most remarkable case was 
that of a little child, tied up closely in its swaddling 
clothes and lying in its cradle. The cradle was flung 
into the water, where it was afterwards found floating 
like a boat, with the child alive and well inside it : so, 
at least, says a contemporary chronicler. 

The custom of having houses on bridges was too 
deeply rooted for the new one to be without them, so 
it was covered with tall structures, with their gable-ends 
to the stream, — more than thirty gables, like the teeth of 
a saw, according to a careful old engraving. The bridge 
so erected at the beginning of the sixteenth century 
remained essentially the same till the eighteenth, except 
that the fronts of the houses were modernized accord- 
ing to the taste of the day. A curious point to be noted 
is that these houses were the first in Paris to be num- 
bered, and with odd numbers on one side and even num- 
bers on the other. It was a place for fashionable shops, 
kept by jewellers, goldsmiths, picture-dealers, — a sort of 
Palais Royal or Boulevard des Italiens of that time. 

This street on the bridge existed till towards the close 
of the eighteenth century, when Louis XVI. decreed 
the demolition of the bridge-houses throughout the 
capital. This innovation was very nearly contempo- 
rary with the political revolution, and was first carried 
into eff"ect on the Pont Notre Dame. Wonderful to 
relate, in spite of so much modern improvement the 
old bridge still exists ; but it has been re-cased in stone 
and altered in some respects externally, so that it has 
now quite a modern air. 



46 Paris. 

The very last relic of old-fashioned picturesqueness 
about the bridges of Paris was the pump just below the 
Pont Notre Dame, built originally in 1678. I remember 
it well ; and not only do I remember the thing itself as 
a material object, but also a certain feeling that it awak- 
ened, — a feeling of respect for a sort of majesty that 
the poor old structure undoubtedly possessed, and of 
regret that the march of improvement would so soon 
remove it. Meryon made a delightful etching of it, one 
of the most remarkable of all his plates for clearness 
and elegance of style, and he also wrote some verses in 
pity for its fate. His etching showed the pump in 
afternoon light ; the accompanying woodcut shows the 
aspect it had on sunny mornings. The truth is that, 
though a poor, cheap structure, it had several fine 
architectural qualities. Its masses were well composed, 
well supported, and admirably crowned by the tower. 

The short space between the Pont Notre Dame and 
the Pont au Change is one of the most interesting in 
Paris. The flower-market, as pretty a sight as the 
modern city could show anywhere, used to extend in 
an open space between the Quai Desaix and what was 
the Rue de la Pelleterie. It had a fine background 
towards the west in the buildings of the Palace of Justice, 
with the picturesque corner tower, and it inspired artists 
with the desire to make pictures of it.^ I wonder what 
artist would care to paint the same scene to-day. Instead 

1 A drawing of it by Turner was engraved in the " Rivers of France," 
but it is one of the weakest in the volume. Turner especially missed the 
character of the clock-tower, which is and always was very definite and 
peculiar 



A Voyage rowtd the Island. 47 

of the pleasant open space which so charmingly disen- 
gaged the buildings of the Palace, we have now a great, 
heavy, ornate, and vulgar modern edifice with a dome, 
— the Tribunal de Commerce; just one of those erec- 
tions which the Philistines always consider " very hand- 
some," and look upon with deep respect because of 
their evident costliness. The best time of this bit of 
Parisian scenery, from the artist's point of view, must 
have been when Girtin drew it in 1800. Then the tow- 
ers of the Palace were not yet united by heavy masses 
of modern building which reduce their importance, and 
the old corner tower had not been replaced by the new 
one. It we go farther back the view is spoiled again 
by another cause. During the latter half of the seven- 
teenth and nearly the whole of the eighteenth centuries 
a massive line of stone houses, five stories high, stood 
on the Pont au Change, and of course effectually 
blocked the view. Earlier still a row of gabled post- 
and-plaster houses stood on a wooden bridge, but these 
were all burnt down in 1621. There was at that time 
another bridge, a very little lower down the river, 
called the Pont Marchand. A servant-girl there let a 
candle fall in a place where firewood was kept, probably 
among shavings, for the house was soon on fire, and 
with it the others and the bridge itself. The flames 
soon reached the Pont aux Changeurs, which was totally 
destroyed. Not only were the bridge-houses burnt, but 
some on the land caught fire also. An eye-witness has 
left an account of this fire, which must have been a 
most remarkable spectacle. When the houses were 



48 Paris. 

already in flames the inhabitants remained as long as 
possible, throwing their goods out of the windows. 
There had been warning for the destruction of the Pont 
Notre Dame : for this there was no warning. 

The houses between the two bridges on the side of 
the island had gables and balconies towards the river ; 
the lower stories of them, near the water (there being 
no quay in old times), were occupied by tanners who 
congregated in this one quarter, according to the medi- 
aeval custom. If these buildings could have been pre- 
served to our own day, they would have been favorite 
subjects for Parisian artists (for whom there is little left) ; 
but as the natural progress of a modern city is towards 
good quays, all the humble old river-side industries have 
to go elsewhere. 

I mentioned the simplification which had resulted from 
modern improvements on the island north of the Pont 
Notre Dame, where eleven streets and three churches 
had made way for a single building. The same process 
has been carried out in the section of the island which 
is included between the lines drawn across it from the 
Pont Notre Dame and the Pont au Change. In this area 
there were formerly nine streets and four churches,^ but 
at the present day there are simply two buildings, — 
the Tribunal de Commerce, already mentioned with the 
degree of respect due to it, and a huge barrack called 

1 The streets were Rue de la Pelleterie, Rue Gervais Laurent, Rue de 
la vieille Draperie, Rue St. Eloi, Rue de la Calandre, Rue aux Feves, 
Rue des Carcuissons, Rue du Marche Neuf, Rue St. Croix ; the churches 
were St. Barthelemi, St. Croix, St. Eloi, and St. Germain. AU these, as 
well as the Marche Neuf, have entirely disappeared. 



A Voyage round the Island. 49 

the Caserne de la Garde Reptiblicaine, of which we can 
only say that it is very extensive, very well built, and 
as tiresome as it is extensive. The real improvement 
which has followed from recent changes is, that the few 
modern streets — the Rue de la Cite, the Boulevard du 
Palais, and the Avenue de Constantine — are so much 
more spacious than the many little streets of former 
times, and give such superior views. They are three 
or four times as broad as the old Rue de la vieille 
Draperie. 

In the Middle Ages there was a bridge for foot- 
passengers only, but with houses upon it, just below the 
present Pont au Change. This was erected exclusively 
for the convenience of the millers, who were allowed to 
occupy nearly the whole width of the river with their 
wheels, placed in the open spaces between the wooden 
piles of which the bridge was built. The whole structure 
was carried away by an inundation towards the close of 
the year 1596, and it was afterwards replaced by the 
Pont Marchand, destroyed in the great fire of 1621. 
There were eleven mills, and the names of the millers 
have been preserved. After the fire it was not thought 
necessary to rebuild the lower bridge, which was not of 
much public utility, so the Pont au Change has remained 
by itself ever since. The present structure is of very 
recent date, having been built in 1859, not quite in the 
same angle as the old bridge (being now more at right 
angles with the river), and a little higher up the stream, 
especially on the side of the island. There is little to 
be said about its architecture, except that the essentially 

4 



50 Paris. 

modern ideas of depressed arches and level roadway- 
have been carefully adhered to, while a certain elegance 
is given by a cornice and balustrade. Such is the 
course of bridge-architecture from the Middle Ages to 
our own time. First comes the wooden mediaeval 
bridge, consisting simply of tall piles rising straight 
from the bed of the stream, and bearing a street of 
crowded houses upon them ; next, the substantial, round- 
arched stone bridge of the .sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, burdened with stone houses, massive and 
lofty ; then the same bridge without the houses ; and, 
lastly, the modern bridge, with depressed arches of 
wider span, and a broad, level roadway above. The 
modern ideal is by far the most rational of all, being 
at the same time the most convenient for vehicles above 
and boats or rafts below, while it reduces to a minimum 
the obstruction of the view. The only objection to it 
is, that its extreme simplicity of purpose has a tendency 
to produce a merely utilitarian structure, unless the 
architect is a man of great taste and intelligence, who 
can give a touch of elegance to a work of plain utility. 
There is a well-known etching by Meryon showing 
the Pont au Change and the round towers of the Palace 
of Justice, seen through an arch of the Pont Notre Dame, 
with the wooden substructure of the old pump to the 
spectator's left. This etching gives, as well as any 
existing illustration, the character of the old Pont au 
Change with its round arches, its plain parapet, its rising 
roadway, and its angular cutwaters. The plate is inter- 
esting, too, for the ingenious introduction of the round 



A Voyage round the Island. 5 1 

towers, which are now all that is left of the picturesque 
between Meryon's position and the Pont Neuf. On the 
right bank of the Seine you have two pretty theatres 
(Chatelet and Lyrique), and the light column of the 
palm-fountain, with the very elegant tower of St. Jacques, 
more visible than ever before ; but the picturesque of 
the river-side is gone. 

In the Middle Ages there was no bridge connecting 
the island with the mainland farther west than the Pont 
Marchand. Another communication was felt to be de- 
sirable long before there was a definite project, and the 
project was under consideration long before it was 
executed. The work of the Pont Neuf was at length 
actually and practically commenced in the year 1578, 
under Henri III., by driving piles on the south side, and 
the southern half of the bridge — that across the narrow 
arm of the Seine — was completed long before the other. 
Henri IV. took up the work vigorously in 1598 and 
finished it in 1604. 

Old fashions linger long, and although no houses were 
erected on the Pont Neuf, small wooden booths were tol- 
erated upon it for a long time ; and after they were 
removed, they had descendants even in the present 
century in the shape of curious httle semicircular shops 
erected on the projections between the arches. These 
are still visible in Meryon's beautiful dry-point of the 
Pont Neuf. They have since been removed, and the pres- 
ent aspect of the bridge very closely resembles its aspect 
in the seventeenth century. The woodcut opposite 
page 50 shows the shorter portion of the bridge, — that 



52 Paris. 

over the narrow arm of the Seine as it appeared in 1845, 
the Httle shops being still visible as turrets not very 
disadvantageously.i Turner liked them, certainly, as 
they are made quite prominent in his impressive draw- 
ing of the entire bridge, while he would certainly have 
removed them if they had displeased him. On the con- 
trary, he was so delighted with them that he made them 
three times as big as they are in reality, relatively to the 
width of the arches.^ 

We will now, if the reader pleases, turn up the narrow 
arm of the Seine till we come to the Pont St. Michel. 
There is a particularly fine view from this bridge, of 
which Lalanne made a very successful etching many 
years ago. The beauty of it consists chiefly in the dis- 
tance, which shows the long perspective of the Louvre 
immediately above the Pont Neuf. All the bridges on 
the island except the Pont Neuf have been carried away 
by some disaster; but that famous one has become a 
proverb for a sound and lasting constitution, so that 
robust Frenchmen proudly compare themselves to it, 
and complimentary ones apply the comparison to their 
friends (never to their political opponents, who are 
always represented as unhealthy). Few bridges have 
been more unlucky than the Pont St. Michel. In 
the fifteenth century it was carried away by a pack of 

1 In this view we are looking dow7t the river from the Quai des 
Orfevres. 

2 This assertion is founded on strict measurement. In reality the semi- 
circular projections on the Pont Neuf measure less than one third the 
diameter of the arch. In Turner's drawing, those to the left are repre- 
sented as equivalent in their diameters to the diameters of the arches 
under them. 




THE MORGUE IN 1840. 



A Voyage round the Island. 53 

moving ice. It was again carried away in the middle of 
the sixteenth century, and destroyed again in the seven- 
teenth. The next structure was of stone, with houses ; 
the present one was built by that true pontifex maximns, 
Napoleon III. 

Close to the Pont St. Michel, on the island shore, used 
to stand a famous httle building which had at one time 
been a boucherie, and which for many years served as 
the dead-house for bodies found in the Seine. The 
" Doric little Morgue " will long be remembered on ac- 
count of the immortality conferred upon it by novelists 
and also by at least one famous poet. Browning, and 
one great artist, Meryon. 

" First came the silent gazers ; next 

A screen of glass, we 're thankful for ; 
Last, the sight's self, the sermon's text, 

The three men who did most abhor 
Their life in Paris yesterday. 

So killed themselves : and now, enthroned 
Each on his copper couch, they lay 

Fronting me, waiting to be owned. 
I thought, and think, their sin's atoned. 

" Poor men, God made, and all for that ! 

The reverence struck me ; o'er each head 
Religiously was hung its hat. 

Each coat dripped by the owner's bed, 
Sacred from touch : each had his berth, 

His boards, his proper place of rest. 
Who last night tenanted on earth 

Some arch where twelve such slept abreast, — 
Unless the plain asphalte seemed best." 



54 Paris. 

The Petit Pont is of far greater historical interest 
than the Pont St. Michel. At the present day it con- 
sists of a single stone arch of depressed curve, and is 
precisely the sort of structure in which the modern 
engineer displays his skill ; but the rather elegant and 
extremely simple Petit Pont of the present day has 
had many very different predecessors. At that spot the 
Romans had a bridge joining Lutetia to the mainland; 
and just here, where the bridge abuts on the south bank 
of the Seine, the gate, fortress, and prison called the 
Petit Chdtelet stood grimly in the Middle Ages, and even 
down to the last years of the eighteenth century. It 
was a building of sinister aspect, with few openings to 
the light of day, and nothing in the way of ornament 
except four simple string-courses and about as many 
bartizans. A Gothic archway led through it from the 
bridge. I willingly spare the reader an account of the 
cruelties committed in this building, and will speak of 
the bridge only. Unlucky as were the other bridges of 
the cite, this was the most unfortunate of all. It is said 
that the rapidity of the current in flood-times was the 
cause of successive accidents, now happily at an end by 
the construction of a single arch beneath which the 
floods rise freely, M. Jourdain tells us, in " Paris a 
travers les Ages," that the Petit Pont fell in 1206, 1280, 
1296, 1325, 1376, and 1393 ; but the most remarkable of 
all its misfortunes occurred much later, in 171 8. At that 
date it consisted of a good stone bridge of three arches 
covered with tall stone houses ; but it seems as if the 
contemporary engineers had not much confidence in 



A Voyage round the Island. 55 

their strength, for beneath the arches, and also at the 
ends of the piers, there were strong wooden scaffoldings, 
like those supporting the pump that Meryon drew. 
Now it so happened in that year 171 8, in the month 
of April, that a woman had lost her son by drowning, 
and that her grief was greatly increased because she 
could not find his body; wherefore the good folks, her 
neighbors, told her of a sure method by which drowned 
bodies might be found, and she believed and obeyed 
them. She took a sebille, which is a thick, round wooden 
tray or dish, she stuck a taper upright in it, which she 
lighted, and with the taper she put a piece of blessed 
bread, the whole in honor of St. Nicholas ; she then 
confided her little boat to the current and watched its 
course. It floated straight to a barge laden with hay, 
the taper set fire to the hay, the men in the barges near 
to it severed the rope that fastened it in order to save 
their boats ; and now, instead of the little votive taper 
in its wooden dish, a great blazing haystack floated 
quickly down to the Petit Pont, where it was stopped 
by the wooden piles under the arch. These soon caught 
fire, and so did all the houses, but the fortress of the 
Petit Chatelet remained uninjured. The houses were 
never rebuilt. 

There is now nothing whatever of visible interest be- 
tween the Petit Pont and the upper extremity of the 
island, except the view of the south side of Notre Dame. 
Changes within our own recollection have entirely 
altered this part of Paris, much to its advantage. The 
old H6tel Dieu occupied the whole space between the 



56 Paris. 

present Petit Pont and the then existing Pont au Double, 
which stood higher up the river than the bridge now 
bearing the same name; and not only did the great 
hospital occupy a long range of building, as ugly as a 
factory, on the island, but it also had another large 
building across the water, on the south bank of the 
Seine, and a block called the Salle St. Cosine on the 
bridge between them. All this effectually obstructed 
the view of Notre Dame; and, indeed, that half of the 
hospital which stood upon the island was on what is 
now the open space in front of the cathedral. Artists 
are not agreed as to the policy of disengaging cathedrals 
so much as Notre Dame is now disengaged ; and cer- 
tainly the cathedral at Rouen comes upon us with a 
sudden impressiveness in the midst of the narrow streets 
and from the small market-place, — an impressiveness 
which would be lost if it could be set in the middle of 
a large field ; but Notre Dame was in former times so 
much injured by the vast size of the ill-contrived old 
HQtel Dieu, that the removal of that particular obstruc- 
tion is unquestionably a great gain. In old times the 
cathedral used to be hidden in a considerable degree by 
the archevechc, now entirely removed. The archbishop 
now lives in a fine Louis XIV. mansion in the Rue Gre- 
nelle St. Germain. The accompanying reproduction of 
an etching by Israel Sylvestre shows the Archbishop's 
Palace as it existed in the seventeenth century, and the 
reader may also see how the buildings of the Hotel Dieu 
stretched across the river. 

Nothing remains to be said concerning our circum- 




m 

mi 

I* 



§1 

i 



A Voyage round the Island. 57 

navigation of the island except that the eastern point of 
it, which in the Middle Ages was a shapeless piece of 
waste land called Le Terrain, and in the eighteenth 
century a garden called the Jardiit du Terrain, is at 
present very neatly arranged in true modern Parisian 
style, and serves as a pretty site for a melancholy little 
structure, the new Morgue, to which the inhabitants of 
southern Paris have immediate access by the Pont de 
I'Archeveche, a bridge which, unlike its elder brethren, 
has no history. 

A sketch of Anglers by Mr. Jacomb Hood gives a bit 
of topography in its background which illustrates our 
present subject. The anglers are on the Quai des Tour- 
nelles, the church is Notre Dame (showing the apse), 
the bridge is the Pont de I'Archeveche, and the bit of 
land going from the bridge to the spectator's right is 
what was formerly called Le Terrain, and is now well 
embanked and defended by a river-wall; while the low 
building whose roof seems to crown the wall near the 
boy's fishing-rod is the present Morgue. 

The quays on both sides of the Seine appear to be- 
long more to the ordinary hfe of the city than the more 
recently built embankment of the Thames. It gener- 
ally happens that some idle youth may be seen lou'^nging 
over the parapet and watching sympathetically an ab"^ 
sorbed angler below who from some stair, or boat at 
anchor, or narrow ledge of masonry, pursues through 
successive hours his mildly exciting sport. It is one of 
the most curious contrasts in the French character that, 
although it is said to be impatient, and often shows 



58 Paris. 

remarkable irritability, it is nevertheless exactly adapted 
to the humblest and dullest sort of angling. Nothing 
can exceed the patience of Parisian anglers or their 
entire absorption in their pursuit. So completely do 
they forget everything else in the indulgence of their 
passion, that during the dreadful day of the Commune, 
the 24th of May, 1871, when the Communards were 
setting fire to the public buildings, and the soldiers from 
Versailles were shooting down the people in the streets, 
one or two faithful pecJieurs a la ligne still followed their 
tranquil pastime close to one of the bridges ; I believe 
it was the Pont Neuf. 




ANGLERS ON THE QUAYS. 



IV. 

NOTRE DAME AND THE SAINTE GHAPELLE. 

'T^HERE are absolutely only these two churches left 
J- standing in the island of the city, and there is 
nothing in the history of Paris which more clearly ex- 
hibits the modern disposition to make a tabida rasa of 
the past. The wonder is that Notre Dame and the Sainte 
Chapelle should themselves have been preserved down 
to our own time. There they stand, however, somewhat 
injured by restoration, yet happily not so much as they 
might have been, and likely to last for centuries still to 
come, considering their present excellent condition of 
material repair. 

But where is the crowd of little churches that clus- 
tered round Notre Dame, as children round their great 
mother? In the Middle Ages she seemed to gather 
them about her as a hen gathers her chickens under her 
wings ; but now they are all gone, and she would be 
left in the most complete sohtude were it not that from 
the court of the Palace of Justice there still rises one 
solitary spire answering to hers, and still, as in the Middle 
Ages, the birds fly from one to the other. 

But where is St. Denis du Pas, where is St. Jean le 
Rond, and where may St. Christopher, Ste. Genevieve, 



6o Paris. 

St. Agnan, St. Landry, St. Peter, St. Denis de la Chartre, 
Ste. Marine, and the Magdalen, find the churches once 
dedicated to them? Can you discover even the sites of 
St. Luke, Ste. Croix, and St. Germain le Vieux? Have 
you ever seen St. Pierre des Areas, St. Barthelemi, and 
St. Eloi? " There is my bridge still," Saint Michael may 
think; " but as for my church, I seek for it in vain ! " 
Where are all these churches of the past, which once 
stood in consecrated ground, and were thought to be safe 
forever, — churches adorned by the mediaeval architect, 
often repaired and injured by later experimentalists at 
the Renaissance, yet interesting always for the bits of 
beautiful old work to be found in them? Ou sont les 
neiges d'antan ? 

Before the present cathedral of Notre Dame there 
was a predecessor built by Childebert, of which we do 
not know very much. It occupied part of the site of 
the present edifice, standing near the Roman wall, and 
to the southeast of it there was another church dedicated 
to Saint Stephen. The site of the original Notre Dame 
is now partly covered by the west front of the edifice 
and a small portion of the nave, and partly left open in 
the space before the cathedral. It was of Romanesque 
architecture and of some splendor. Probably, if it had 
been preserved to the present day, we should have 
looked upon it with great interest as a very early speci- 
men of church-building, but it is not likely that it would 
have produced on our minds, accustomed as we are to 
the magnificence of fully developed Gothic, the efi'ect 
that it produced on its own contemporaries. As for the 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 6 1 

site of St. Etienne, the present sacristy stands on a part 
of it. 

The present cathedral of Notre Dame was begun in 
1161, the first stone being laid by a Pope, — Alex- 
ander III., — and in 1185 mass was said at the high 
altar. This would only prove that the choir was finished, 
or at least covered in. The southern entrance was be- 
gun in 1257, and the great western entrance from the 
Place du Parois was finished in 1223, up to the line of 
the gallery. The towers were finished in the time of 
Saint Louis. 

An important matter in the history of Notre Dame is 
the fire of 12 18, caused by thieves, because that brought 
about an architectural alteration clearly described as 
follows by M. Drumont in " Paris a travrse les Ages : " 

" Before this fire the great flying buttresses of the nave and 
choir were constructed a double volee, which means that instead 
of crossing over the space between the buttresses and the vaults 
in arches of a single span, they were composed of two portions 
or arches, with an intermediate support. The fire probably in- 
jured the second span of the old flying buttresses. At that time 
other cathedrals had been erected, and their walls were pierced 
with larger windows, filled with brilliantly stained glass, — a deco- 
ration which was rapidly becoming important. Instead of repair- 
ing the harm done by the fire, the restorers of that time seized 
upon the opportunity for suppressing the rose-windows pierced 
above the galleries, and brought the upper windows lower, cut- 
ting away their support down to the archivolt of the galleries. 
The flying buttresses a double volee were demolished, and the 
height of the windows of the triforium was reduced by lowering 
its vaults." 



62 Paris. 

The tall windows were filled with simple tracery, and 
in the opinion of Viollet-le-Duc the majesty of the first 
edifice was in a great measure sacrificed by these 
changes. So far as I am able to judge by M. Hofi"- 
bauer's drawing, which restores the apse to its primitive 
condition, and shows the double-arched buttresses, the 
most striking difference between the first apse and the 
present one was in the successive stages of roof which 
were visible in the first, while at present only the high- 
est roof is visible, the others having been so much 
lowered in pitch to make way for the elongated windows 
that they are no more to be seen. The change, in fact, 
is that change which we find everywhere in the progress 
of Gothic architecture, — from a simple, strong-looking, 
and dignified style, to a lighter, more airy, more deli- 
cate, and elegant style. It is perfectly intelligible that 
a master of architecture like Viollet-le-Duc, who knew 
all about construction, should have preferred the first 
apse, with its short, plain windows, its visible tiers of 
roof, and its substantial, doubly supported buttresses ; 
but, at the same time, it is intelligible that most people 
should prefer the east end of the church as it exists at 
present, with its light, far-leaping buttresses, its long 
clerestory windows, and the rich windows of the chapels 
and aisle, decorated externally with crockets and finials. 
Besides, there are many pinnacles now (people always 
like pinnacles, — the great popularity of Milan Cathedral 
is due to them), and it does not appear that there were 
any pinnacles about the first apse. 

The great west front, where the towers are, is one of 



Notice Dame and the Sainfe Chapelle. 63 

the chief architectural glories of France. There is hardly 
any work of architecture in the whole world, except one 
or two Greek temples, which has evoked the same kind 
and degree of admiration as the west front of Notre 
Dame. It is considered to be one of those rarest pro- 
ducts of consummate genius in which imagination of 
the highest kind works in perfect accordance with the 
most severe reason. May I confess frankly that until 
I had carefully studied it under the guidance of Viollet- 
le-Duc, the front of Notre Dame never produced upon 
me the same effect as the west fronts of some other 
French cathedrals of equal rank? I believe the reason 
to be that Notre Dame is not so picturesque as some 
others, and does not so much excite the imagination as 
they do. It is well ordered, and a perfectly sane piece 
of work (which Gothic architecture is not always), but 
it has not the imaginative intricacy of Rouen, nor the 
rich exuberance of Amiens and Reims, nor the fortress- 
like grandeur of Bourges, nor the elegant variety of 
Chartres. A man of very high architectural attainments 
would probably value the romantic element less than I 
do, simply because much that seems rich and imaginative 
to an amateur in architecture is understood too quickly 
in all its details by a master for it to produce the same 
poetic feeling in his mind ; and I observe that architects 
esteem especially the judicious ordonnance of parts, 
which is a great virtue no doubt, but a very sober vir- 
tue, imposing a very strict discipline on the imagination. 
The truth is, that the virtues of the west front of Notre 
Dame are rather classic than romantic. Everything in 



64 Paris. 

it seems the result of perfect knowledge and consum- 
mate calculation. There are none of those mistakes 
which generally occur in works of wilder genius. Story- 
after story the massive front rears itself to the towers ; 
every division of it is acceptable either as a resting-place 
for the eye or as an attraction. First, you have the 
three great doorways, with the world of sculpture usual 
in the French Gothic portals, but the row of statues 
does not come out and round the buttresses as at 
Amiens and Reims. The buttresses are left plain ex- 
cept that there is a niche in each of them twenty feet 
from the ground, and one statue in each niche with 
its feet higher than the heads of the great statues. 
Above the arches the wall is perfectly plain instead of 
being enriched with crocketed gables, as at Amiens and 
Reims; and above this plain space comes the great 
gallery of the kings, with its twenty-eight statues in 
their niches. Over this gallery runs a sort of platform 
or balcony called the Galerie de la Vierge ; and then 
we come to the great space of wall, very plain in itself, 
which is occupied by the great windows, the rose in the 
middle and the ogival windows, of two lights and a rose 
above, in each of the towers. Perhaps the most espe- 
cially characteristic thing in this front is the light colon- 
nade above the windows, which makes a sort of open 
screen in the space between the towers, and by this 
means prevents too much abruptness in the separation 
of the towers from the main mass of the building. This 
colonnade is not only extremely elegant in itself, but it 
is placed with so much judgment as to give a lightness 




TYMPANUM OF THE PORTE .STE. ANNE. 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 65 

to the whole front, which could hardly have been ob- 
tained by any other means. The upper part of the 
towers is remarkable for the great length of the open- 
ings (about fifty feet), and both towers seem to termi- 
nate very plainly and abruptly, having no pinnacles and 
nothing to relieve the level line except the httle turrets 
at the top of the staircases. This, however, is explained 
by the fact that it was intended to have spires, and that 
the towers we see were entirely designed with a view to 
them. That project was never carried into execution, 
and even the enterprise of the nineteenth century shrank 
from it when Notre Dame was restored. Is the absence 
of the spires to be regretted? We have some means of 
judging this question by a comparison of the west front 
as it is with the drawing of it with spires which was 
engraved and published in the " Entretiens sur I'Archi- 
tecture," by Viollet-le-Duc. So far as the towers only 
are concerned, the effect of the spires is excellent. 
They at once reduce the long louvre-windows to due 
proportions, and remove the otherwise unaccountable 
plainness of the summits of the square towers. But on 
the rest of the front the effect of the spires is not so 
happy. The arcade is tall enough not to be stunted by 
them, but the gallery of the kings and the great door- 
ways are made to appear much more insignificant than 
they are at present. At the same time two consider- 
ations ought not to be forgotten. It is quite possible 
that the spires intended by the mediaeval architect may 
have been lighter in appearance than those designed by 
Viollet-le-Duc, and it is also to be remembered that an 

5 



66 Paris. 

architect's elevation always produces quite a different 
effect upon the mind from the sight of the reality in 
stone. Had the spires been completed, no one ap- 
proaching close enough to see the statues in the portals 
and in the gallery of the kings would have seen the 
spires at the same time ; he would only have been con- 
scious of their existence. 

I have said that the virtues of the west front of 
Notre Dame are rather classic than romantic. It is 
a generally received idea that exact symmetry was 
one of the classical characteristics; but a closer ex- 
amination of classical works reveals unsuspected varie- 
ties in measurements which are supposed to have had 
for their object the avoidance of mechanical dulness. 
The variety in Gothic architecture is so frequently 
apparent that the popular mind associates the idea 
of variety with Gothic work as it associates symmetry 
with Greek. There are, however, in Gothic buildings 
certain parts which appear to be symmetrical, and 
which frequently are not so. That this variety was 
intentional is quite certain. An architect is not like 
a landscape-painter who draws by the eye, and may 
accidentally make one object smaller than another 
when he intended them to be alike. An architect 
measures everything, so that, so far as dimensions are 
concerned, there can never be an undetected error in 
his completed work. The two towers of Notre Dame, 
which every careless tourist believes to be exactly alike, 
are not of the same size. The southern tower is nar- 
rower than the other. It has been suggested that this 




PIER AND ONE OF THE DOORS OF THE PORTE STE. ANNE. 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chape lie. 67 

may have been to give better access to the bishop's 
residence, which was on that side, but the hypothesis 
is unnecessary. The difference is sufficiently explained 
by the dislike for exact repetition, which is a charac- 
teristic of living work in the fine arts. There are 
also differences in the details, sufficiently visible to 
give reasons for preferring one of the towers to the 
other. MM. de Guilhermy and Viollet-le-Duc pre- 
ferred the larger tower, that to the north, as being 
more ample in its details and better executed. 

A detailed description of the sculpture on the west 
front would occupy many pages, and be unreadable. 
Of the three portals, that in the middle has the Last 
Judgment for the subject of its tympanum ; that on 
the north side illustrates the life, death, and glorifica- 
tion of the Virgin ; that on the south side is more 
confused. It is called the portail St. Anne, but is 
composed of fragments illustrating the lives of Saint 
Anne and the Virgin also. It is curious for the 
adaptation of transitional work (from Romanesque to 
Gothic) to a purely Gothic purpose. As the carvings 
already existed, it seems to have been thought right 
to employ them, but they would not fit the new fashion 
of the pointed arch ; so the space between the two kinds 
of arch had to be dissimulated by filling it up with 
an enrichment in sculpture. Notwithstanding the great 
ability of the architect, we may be allowed to remark 
that he did not manage his raccord so cleverly as he 
might have done. The lower arch should have been 
effaced, and the space above it filled with angels. One 



68 Paris. 

objection applies even to the most perfect Gothic 
tympana of this kind ; namely, the varying scales of 
the figures, which deprive the composition of unity. 

One of the strong points in Notre Dame is the 
preservation of a few of her fine old doors. Those 
of the Virgin and Saint Anne have still their magnifi- 
cent original iron-work of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries. The common people used to believe quite 
seriously that it was the Devil himself who had helped 
the smith in exchange for his soul, as mere unaided 
human skill was unequal to such a task. There was 
also a popular belief that an enchanter had shut the 
porte Ste. Anne so that it could not be opened, — the fact 
being simply that for a long time it was disused. 

The reader must excuse me if I do not enter into 
details with reference to the north and south sides of' 
Notre Dame, We have not space for a study of the 
subject, and it is not of any special interest except as 
regards the buttresses, which are very massive, and 
from which spring two arches to prop the walls, one 
reaching to the wall of the higher aisle, by passing over 
the roof of the lower aisle, and another clearing the 
roofs of both the aisles in two leaps, with a rest on 
the wall between, and then giving its support directly 
to the lofty walls of the clerestory itself Another 
notable feature in the north and south fronts is the 
great rose-windows in the transepts, which, from their 
height, may be seen from a distance. 

Now, let us pass into the interior. The first thing 
that strikes anybody conversant with architecture, after 




LES TRIBUNES. 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chap elk. 69 

the first strong impression of size and majesty, is that 
the columns of the nave are massive and Romanesque 
in character, and not so lofty, relatively to the height 
of the vault, as the columns at Westminster or Amiens, 
not to speak of the extraordinary ones at Bourges. 
There is, in fact, room for no less than five of these 
columns between the pavement and the apex of the 
vault. When Notre Dame was begun the Romanesque 
spirit was only just passing into the Gothic spirit, so 
that the church is not quite completely Gothic as yet, 
though very nearly so. Its double aisles are a remark- 
able feature, of great value in giving mysterious dis- 
tances with many intersections of the vaults. They 
run entirely round the building, and have allowed the 
architect the means of creating a great gallery above 
the inner aisle (which is wider than the external one) ; 
a gallery of much value in a cathedral where magnifi- 
cent royal ceremonies were expected to take place. 
This gallery is always called Les Tribunes by French 
writers. The view we give is taken on the south side 
of the cathedral ; and the reason why it seems to come 
to a sudden termination is because the transept occurs 
there. With the exception of the interruption caused 
by the transepts, this gallery goes round the entire 
edifice, and has four staircases of its own.^ Not only 
is it very useful on great occasions, but it adds im- 
mensely to the elegance of the whole church, and 
looks all the more delicate and airy because it is 
lighted from the exterior. 

1 It also turns aside into the transepts to the extent of two large bays. 



70 Paris. 

In most of the French .cathedrals the pourtoiir dii 
chceur, or aisle between the apse and the chapels, 
excels all other portions of the church in the variety 
of its perspective and in the delightful changes occur- 
ring at every step as the visitor slowly advances. When 
he walks down the middle of a straight nave between 
parallel rows of columns, he may be impressed by 
the grandeur that surrounds him, but he always knows 
what to expect. In the poiirtoiiv there is the new 
element of the unforeseen. He sees first one part of 
a chapel and then another; he loses one beautiful 
and intricate composition of columns, vaults, and 
windows, only to exchange it for another not less 
beautiful; and so attractive is the desire for what is 
coming, so keen the regret for what is left behind, 
that it is almost equally difficult to stay in one place 
or to leave it. This, at least, is what I have always 
felt in the few great poiirtoiirs which are comparable 
to that of Notre Dame. This one, in particular, has 
the additional intricacy of its double aisle, and now 
that it is enriched with painted glass and mural illu- 
mination the effect is at the same time more splendid 
and more mysterious than in the chilly eighteenth 
century. 

This brings one to speak of the restorations which 
have been carried out at Notre Dame in our own day. 
Nothing is easier than to condemn such restorations 
absolutely ; but those who do so cannot surely realize 
what was the state of such edifices as Notre Dame be- 
fore the modern restorer dealt with them. It should be 




THE " POURTOUR." 



N'otre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 71 

remembered that no age but our own ever had the 
sHghtest respect for the work of any preceding age, 
that we are the first human beings who ever valued 
the architectural work of our ancestors, the first who 
were ever pained by injury done to the work of another 
time, the first who ever understood that unity of design 
might be one of the merits of a building. Instances 
of injury done to great edifices before the modern re- 
storer came are infinitely numerous ; but I must here 
confine myself to Notre Dame. First, let us rapidly 
survey the exterior. 

In the west front the row of statues called the Kings 
had been all cast down at the Revolution. Were the 
niches to be left empty ? Certainly the original archi- 
tect never intended them to be empty ; his intention was 
that there should be statues, and the modern restorer 
fulfilled that intention, so far by putting statues there. 
The subjects are supposed to have been the Kings of 
Judah, and as the real faces of those kings have not 
come down to posterity in portraits, the present set of 
statues are as much likenesses as their predecessors. 
The important point was to have statues in keeping 
with the character of the building ; and this was done 
as far as possible by copying such fragments of the old 
statues as could be found, and by imitating others in 
cathedrals of the same date. The restorer could not 
have done less, and it is not easy to see how he could 
have done more. Now let us pass to the central door- 
way. Among the lights of the eighteenth century was 
a famous architect called Soufflot, who fancied that he 



72 Paris. 

could improve upon Gothic ideas, and who, unfortu- 
nately, had the power to alter as well as to criticise. 
So he removed the pier between the doors, with the 
statue of Christ, and made a wide pointed arch in the 
middle of the tympanum, cutting into its elaborate 
sculpture as coolly as if it had been a common brick 
wall. Then he put classical columns, with modern 
doors, and was perfectly satisfied with his improvement. 
Could Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc, the restorers, leave 
this incongruous absurdity untouched? Clearly not. 
They had the pier replaced, and they got an able 
sculptor, Dechaume, to carve a Christ for it, which he 
did after careful study of the statues at Amiens and 
Reims. The tympanum was restored as far as possible, 
and Soufiflot's Renaissance doors were replaced by 
others more in keeping with those of the Virgin and 
Saint Anne. Surely, in this case also, it would hardly 
have been possible to do less. Other details might be 
dwelt upon if we had space ; but let us consider a little 
what was the condition of the north and south sides. 
Let us hear Viollet-le-Duc's account of the state in 
which he found them : — 

"They (the architects of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries) had altered in the most deplorable manner the 
architecture of the sides of the nave. One might say that this 
portion of the edifice had been, as it were, planed. One after 
another the architects had suppressed the advancing parts of 
the buttresses between the chapels, the gables, the friezes, the 
balustrades, — in one word, the entire ornamentation of these 
same chapels, the pinnacles which decorated the tops of the 
buttresses with the statues that accompanied them and their 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 'j'^ 

flowering spires, the picturesque gargoyles which rendered 
the service of throwing the rain-water to a distance from the 
walls." 

Were the restorers to leave the sides of the cathedral 
in this naked condition, or were they to attempt to 
adorn them again as nearly as possible according 
to the first intention of the builders? They decided 
to make the attempt, and they felt authorized to do so 
because they knew more about Gothic architecture, and 
had more love for it, than any other architects since 
the Renaissance. At the intersection of the roof there 
had been a light spire in Gothic times, — light, I mean, 
in appearance, made of oak, covered with lead. This 
spire was pulled down in 1793. Was its place to be 
left vacant? Certainly there was no inability to erect 
an elegant new spire, as the one now existing clearly 
proves. The architect Soufflot, who spoiled the great 
doorway, had built a vestry on the south side of the 
cathedral in a style which the reader may imagine. Part 
of it remained to our own day, but this was removed, 
and a new one erected by Viollet-le-Duc in thirteenth- 
century Gothic. There are two objections to this build- 
ing: it looks rather too pretty and too intentionally 
contrived for the picturesque, and its newness is still out 
of keeping, but it does no harm whatever to Notre 
Dame. It would be difficult to suggest anything better. 
Now, with regard to the interior. Here the ignorance 
and bad taste of the ages in which Gothic architecture 
was not understood had full play for several generations. 
The choir of a church is the part most richly furnished 



74 Paris. 

and decorated. In the Middle Ages the choir of Notre 
Dame was completely furnished with all the elaborate 
works of art which the feeling of the time held to be 
necessary in a great religious edifice; and down to the 
close of the seventeenth century these things were still 
in existence. There were the old stalls of the fourteenth 
century; there was a magnificent carved screen in open 
stonework going all round the choir; there was the 
high altar, with its columns of brass, its shrine of silver- 
gilt, its winged angels. All these things disappeared 
to make way for costly Renaissance decorations, which 
have been respected as far as possible by the modern 
restorers. In 1741 the Chapter gave orders for the re- 
moval of the splendid stained glass which filled the 
windows of the nave and choir; and a man called 
Pierre Levieil was ordered to replace them with common 
glass ornamented with a border of fleurs-de-lis. Levieil 
set about his work honestly and innocently, believing 
that it was quite proper to destroy what future ages 
could never replace, and he has left in writing some 
record of his doings. Regret for all the magnificence 
thus lost forever is happily tempered by rejoicing, as it 
most fortunately happened that the barbarians let alone 
the great rose-windows of the transepts and the west 
front. Modern art has endeavored in some measure to 
replace what was destroyed, being clearly authorized 
to do so by the intention of the original builders, who 
counted upon the effect of colored glass in temper- 
ing the excess of light. Viollet-le-Duc went a little 
further in one detail, for he took the opportunity of 




ROYAL THANKSGIVING IN NOTRE DAME, 1 782. 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 75 

opening new rose-windows above the tribunes, near the 
transepts and choir, to recall the original arrangement 
by which such windows existed over the arches of the 
tribunes. This adds to the interest and peculiarity of 
the building, and has an historical reference. 

All that remains to be said about the restoration is 
that the architects found Notre Dame entirely covered 
internally with thick coats of colored washes, which 
they removed for two reasons, — firstly, because they 
were hideous; and, secondly, because they prevented 
the masons from examining the condition of the stone- 
work and making the necessary repairs. 

The degree to which Gothic architecture was appre- 
ciated in the eighteenth century may be judged of by 
the fact that when the old painted glass was removed, 
the nave was turned into a picture-gallery, so as to "hide 
every one of the arches, — as if there could be anything 
more necessary than its arches to the effect of a Gothic 
church ! The pictures are now, happily, removed. 
Good or bad, they were equally out of place. Pic- 
tures, other than mural paintings of a severely conven- 
tional kind, always are out of place in spacious Gothic 
interiors. 

The origin of the Sainte Chapelle is probably known 
already to most of my readers. It is nothing more 
than a large stone shrine to contain relics. Nothing 
could exceed the joy of Saint Louis when he believed 
himself to have become the possessor of the real crown 
of thorns and a large piece of the true cross. He 
bought them at a very high price from the Emperor of 



*]6 Paris. 

Constantinople,^ and held them in such reverence that 
he and his brother, the Count of Artois, carried them in 
their receptacle on their shoulders (probably as a palan- 
quin is carried), walking barefooted through the streets 
of Sens and Paris : such was the thoroughness of the 
King's faith and his humility towards the objects of his 
veneration. 

These feelings led Saint Louis to give orders for the 
erection of a chapel in which the relics were to be pre- 
served, and he commanded Peter of Montereau to build 
it, which Peter did very speedily, as the King laid the 
first stone in 1245, and the edifice was consecrated in 
April, 1248. There are two chapels, a low one on the 
ground-floor and a lofty one above it; so both were 
consecrated simultaneously by different prelates, the 
upper one being dedicated to the Holy Crown and the 
Holy Cross, the other to the Virgin Mary. 

Considering the rapidity of the work done, it is re- 
markable that it should be, as it is, of exceptionally 
excellent quality considered simply with reference to 
handicraft and to the materials employed. The stone 
is all hard and carefully selected, while each course is 
fixed with clamp-irons imbedded in lead, and the fitting 
of the stones, according to Viollet-le-Duc, is " d'wie 
precision rare." 

1 Some say that the crown of thorns was purchased from John of 
Brienne, the Emperor, and the piece of the true cross from Baldwin IL, 
his successor ; others say that both were purchased from Baldwin II. 
The cost to Saint Louis, including the reliquaries, is said to have been 
two millions of livres. So far as the King's happiness was concerned, 
the money could not have been better spent. 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. jj 

Like Notre Dame the Sainte Chapelle has undergone 
thorough and careful restoration in the present century. 
For those who blame such restorations indiscriminately 
I will give a short description of the state of the build- 
ing when it was placed in the restorer's hands. It had 
been despoiled at the Revolution and was used as a 
magazine for law-papers. The spire had been totally 
destroyed, the roof was in bad repair, sculpture injured 
or removed, the internal decoration mostly effaced, the 
stained glass removed from the lower part of the win- 
dows to a height of three feet, and the rest patched with 
fragments regardless of subject. The chapel was an 
unvalued survival of the past, falling rapidly into com- 
plete decay, and surrounded by the modern buildings 
of the law courts, so its isolation made total destruc- 
tion probable. There had been a time when the 
Sainte Chapelle had been in more congenial company. 
The delightfully fanciful and picturesque old Cour des 
Comptes had been built under Louis XIL (1504), on 
the southwest side, and there was the great Gothic Cour 
de Mai, and, finally, the Great Hall on the north. Not 
only that, but there was the Tresor des Chartes, attached 
to the south side of the Sainte Chapelle, itself a treasure, 
almost a miniature of the glorious chapel, with its own 
little apse, and windows, and high-pitched roof. All 
these treasures of architecture were gone forever, re- 
placed by dull, prosaic building; the Sainte Chapelle 
served no purpose that any dry attic would not have 
served equally well, and there seemed to be no reason 
why it should not be destroyed like the rest. The 



yS Paris. 

decision was to restore it, and give it a special destina- 
tion as the place where the lawyers might hear the mass 
of the Holy Ghost. The work was done thoroughly and 
carefully by learned and accomplished men. M. Lassus 
designed a new spire, ^ an exquisitely beautiful work of 
art, much more elegant than its predecessor, as the 
reader may judge in some degree by comparing the 
etching with the woodcut.^ Still, to appreciate the new 
spire properly, one needs an architectural drawing on a 
large scale, like that in the monograph by Guilhermy, 
It is of oak, covered with lead, with two open arcades. 
There are pinnacles between the gables of the upper 
arcade, and on these pinnacles are eight angels with 
high, folded wings and trumpets. Near the roof are 
figures of the twelve apostles. All along the roof-ridge 
runs an open crest-work, and at the point over the apse 
stands an angel with a cross. All these things, judi- 
ciously enlivened by gilding, with the present high 
pitch of the roof, add greatly to the poetical impres- 
sion, especially when seen in brilliant sunshine against 
an azure sky. 

Thanks to the restorers, the interior of the chapel 
once more produces the effect of harmonious splendor 
which belonged to it in the days of Saint Louis. Of all 

1 The spire by Lassus is the fourth. The first, by Pierre de Monte- 
reau, became unsafe from old age ; the second was burnt in 1630 ; the 
third was destroyed in the Great Revolution. 

'^ The woodcut is from a picture now at Versailles, painted by an 
artist named Martin in 1705. It is possible that he may have stunted the 
spire a little to get it into his canvas ; he certainly has depressed the 
roof, unless the roof then existing fell considerably short of the original 
pitch. 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle, 79 

the Gothic edifices I have ever visited, this one seems to 
me most pre-eminently a visible poem. It is hardly of 
this world, it hardly belongs to the dull realities of life. 
Most buildings are successful only in parts, so that we 
say to ourselves, "Ah, if all had been equal to that! " 
or else we meet with some shocking incongruity that 
spoils everything; but here the motive, which is that of 
perfect splendor, is maintained without flaw or failure 
anywhere. The architect made his windows as large 
and lofty as he could (there is hardly any wall, its work 
is done by the buttresses) ; and he took care that the 
stonework should be as light and elegant as possible, 
after which he filled it with a vast jewelry of painted 
glass. Every inch of wall is illuminated like a missal, 
and so delicately that some of the illuminations are 
repeated of the real size in Guilhermy's monograph. 
When we become somewhat accustomed to the uni- 
versal splendor (which from the subdued light is by no 
means crude or painful), we begin to perceive that the 
windows are full of little pictorial compositions; and if 
we have time to examine them, there is occupation for 
us, as the windows contain more than a thousand of 
these pictures. Thanks to the care of M. Guilhermy, 
they have been set in order again. The most interest- 
ing among them, for us, on account of the authenticity 
of the historical details, is the window which illustrates 
the translation of the relics. Here we have the men of 
the time of Saint Louis on land and sea. In the other 
windows the Old and New Testaments are illustrated. 
Genesis takes ninety-one compositions, Exodus a hun- 



8o Paris. 

dred and twenty-one, and so on, each window having 
its own history.^ 

There are four broad windows in each side, though 
from the exterior two of these look sHghtly narrower 
because they are somewhat masked by the west turrets. 
The apse is hghted by five narrower windows, and 
there are two, the narrowest of all, which separate the 
apse from the nave. 

In the time of Henri II. a very mistaken project was 
carried into execution. A marble screen, with altars 
set up against it, was built across the body of the chapel 
so as to divide it, up to a certain height, into two parts. 
Happily, this exists no longer. 

The original intention of Louis IX. when he built the 
Sainte Chapelle was that the upper chapel should be 
reserved for the sovereign and the royal house, while 
the lower one was for the officers of inferior degree. 
The King's chapel was on a level with his apartments 
in the palace, so that he walked to it without using 
stairs. The lower chapel has now been completely 
decorated like the upper one, on the principles of illu- 
mination. It is beautiful, but comparatively heavy and 
crypt-like, and the decoration looks more crude, perhaps 

^ The only thing in the Sainte Chapelle which can be considered in 
any degree incongruous with the unity of the first design is the rose- 
window at the west end, which was erected by Charles VIII. near the 
close of the fifteenth century. The flamboyant tracery is of a restless 
character, all in very strong curves, and the glass is quite different from 
the gorgeous jewel-mosaics of the time of Saint Louis. The subjects are 
all from the Apocalypse. However, this window inflicts little injury on 
the general effect of the chapel, as the visitor is under it when he enters, 
and it is isolated from the rest. In service time everybody has his back 
to it. 




SAINT LOUIS IN THE SAINTE CHAPELLE. 



Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 8 1 

because the vault is so much lower and nearer the eye. 
A curious detail may be mentioned in connection with 
the religious services in the Sainte Chapelle. They 
were of a sumptuous description, as the "treasurer," 
who was the chief priest, wore the mitre and ring, had 
pontifical rank, and was subject only to the Pope. He 
was assisted in the services by one chanter, twelve 
canons, nineteen chaplains, and thirteen clerks. When 
Saint Louis dwelt in his royal house close by and came 
to the Sainte Chapelle, the place must have presented 
such a concentration of mediaeval splendor as was 
never seen elsewhere in such narrow limits. His enthu- 
siasm may seem superstitious to us, but he endeavored 
earnestly to make himself a perfect king according to 
the lights of his time, so that his splendid chapel is 
associated with the memory of a human soul as sound 
and honest as its handicrafts, as beautiful as its art. 



V. 

THE TUILERIES AND THE LUXEMBOURG. 

SOME readers may ask why the Tuileries should be 
a subject for a chapter in a work on Paris, when 
the palace is a thing of the past, and the last stones of 
it have been carted away from its empty site. 

To this objection there are two replies. The first is, 
that the historical importance of the palace will make 
some mention of it inevitable in every work on Paris for 
ages yet to come ; because, if the stones are no longer 
there, the site must ever remain. The second answer 
is of a more positive and practical nature, making no 
appeal to feelings with reference to past history, which 
exist powerfully enough in some minds but are entirely 
absent from others. The Palace of the Tuileries has 
always been held to include the two blocks of buildings 
at the northern and southern extremities, called the 
Pavilion de Marsan and the Pavilion de Flore ; and by 
some authorities the lines of building running eastward 
from these pavilions are held to belong to the Tuileries, 
as far as the pavilions de Rohan and Lesdigui^res. 
Now all this exists at the present day, after much res- 
toration, even after much reconstruction; and is still 



The Tuikries and the Luxembourg. ^t^ 

an architectural feature of Paris too important to be 
omitted. 

Many readers of these pages will remember the Tuile- 
ries as they appeared in the time of Napoleon III. In 
those days the main body of the palace was a very thin 
and very long line of building, which extended from the 
Rue de Rivoli on the north to the bank of the Seine on 
the south ; and included nine masses, each with its own 
roof. In the middle stood the Pavilion de I'Horloge, 
and at the two extremities, as I have just had occasion 
to observe, the pavilions Marsan and Flore. The re- 
maining six masses of building were distributed sym- 
metrically, three on each side the Pavilion de I'Horloge, 
but each pair of them differed greatly from the others. 

The first impression produced by the Tuileries on a 
foreigner who knew nothing about its architectural his- 
tory was that " it was a vast and venerable pile " : — 

"Huge halls, long galleries, spacious chambers, joined 
By no quite lawful marriage of the arts, 
Might shock a connoisseur ; but when combined, 

Formed a whole which, irregular in parts, 
Yet left a grand impression on the mind." 

I remember that first "grand impression" well, and 
can easily recover it even now. The great length of the 
garden front gave a magnificent effect of perspective, 
ending admirably with the towering pavilions, and di- 
vided by the central pavilion and the range of different 
roofs which rose one behind another like mountains. 
The color was a fine warm gray, turned to a golden 
gray by the effulgence of sunset, when the long range 



84 Paris. 

of windows glistened in the evening light. It is said that 
on a certain day in the year when the sun was to be seen 
exactly within the great, far-away arch of triumph, the 
last of the French kings would come out on the balcony 
of the great central pavilion and watch the rare and 
magnificent spectacle. It is not very long since then, 
in mere numbering of years ; and there are people still 
living who have seen the King on the royal balcony, yet 
it belongs even now as much to the past as the princely 
life at Nineveh. The last King lies, nearly forgotten, in 
the mausoleum on the top of the hill at Dreux, wisely 
chosen far from the capital, that the House of Orleans 
might rest in final peace; and where the long, pictu- 
resque old palace stood is a great gap of empty air. 

The destruction of the Tuileries by the Communards 
was a lamentable event from the point of view of the 
historian and the archaeologist, but artistically the loss 
is not great. If the Empire had lasted, the palace 
would have been destroyed by architects, as the total re- 
construction of it had been decided upon long before. 
In spite of the immense sums which at diff*erent times 
had been spent in making it habitable, it still remained 
one of the most inconvenient houses in the world. The 
extreme (relative) narrowness of it made communication 
troublesome and long, while there was a great want of 
proper corridors ; and, in short, the structure was only 
the result of adding and mending, not the realization of 
a logical and orderly plan. I cannot say whether the 
projects for the new palace had ever been elaborated 
in the shape of finished drawings ; if they were, it was 



The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 85 

thought judicious not to show them to the pubhc ; but 
long before the fall of the Empire I was told, by one 
who knew the imperial intentions, that the old palace of 
the Tuileries was condemned. The first step was taken 
by pulling down the Pavilion de Flore, and when the 
new one was erected in its place, a short piece of new 
work, equally magnificent, was carried northward and 
stopped abruptly, to accustom the public to the idea of 
its ultimate continuation. At the same time it does not 
appear that Louis Napoleon contemplated the imme- 
diate rebuilding of the Tuileries, as he arranged a very 
beautiful and costly suite of private apartments for the 
Empress within the shell of the old palace. 

Hardly any old country-house in England has been 
built in such a haphazard fashion. The first architect 
no more thought of uniting the Tuileries to the Louvre 
than the builder of Buckingham Palace thought of join- 
ing it to the Horse Guards; and yet this notion ulti- 
mately governed everything, entirely depriving the 
Tuileries of completeness and independence, and mak- 
ing it only part of a colossal whole, which, from the 
artistic point of view, was simply a colossal error. 

The history of it begins in the year 1564, when 
Catherine de Medicis conceived the idea of having a 
palace to herself near the Louvre, yet independent, in 
which she might be near enough to her son Charles IX. 
to have influence over him. She wanted it to be a 
country-house, or what we should call suburban, just 
well without the walls of Paris. Here the reader must 
be reminded that in 1564 the wall of Paris was no 



86 Paris. 

longer that of Philippe-Auguste, which went through 
the present square of the Louvre, but that of Charles V., 
which went through what is now the Place du Carrousel, 
just to the east of the Salle des Etats, or a little to the 
west of the pavilions de Rohan and Lesdiguieres. It 
was a fine strong wall, with square towers, and a round 
tower at the corner near the Seine, called the Toilv dit 
Bois, which remained long afterwards, and is a familiar 
object in old prints. 

There is this very curious coincidence in the first 
construction of the palaces of the Louvre and the 
Tuileries, Each of them, in the beginning, was intended 
to be just outside the wall of Paris, the Louvre being 
west of the wall of Philippe-Auguste, the Tuileries west 
of Charles V.'s wall. The difference in the style of 
architecture adopted marks the difference between the 
temper of Gothic and Renaissance times. Philippe- 
Auguste built the Louvre as a strong Gothic fortress ; 
Catherine de Medicis, with ideas imported from Florence, 
wanted a Renaissance palace of graceful architecture 
where she might dwell in elegance and comfort. She 
got her elegant dwelling, but had not much comfort 
there, as it happened. 

And now, from an artistic point of view, comes the 
saddest part of the whole story. Catherine had a man 
of taste and even genius at her orders, the great archi- 
tect Philibert Delorme, and he had a plan for a palace 
of moderate dimensions but of perfectly rational con- 
ception, — such a palace as would have been a really 
complete work of art, and a great ornament to Paris in 



The Tuilcries and Ihe Luxembourg. 87 

our own day, had it been preserved so long. Catherine 
appreciated and employed him ; but she was short of 
funds, and he unluckily only lived a few years, so that 
his complete plan could not be carried out in his life- 
time, which would have settled everything. 

As the name of Philibert Delorme is so closely con- 
nected with the origin of the palace, there is a common 
popular belief that at least the central pavilion and the 
wings nearest it were built by him, as we knew them, and 
such is the power of fame that they were often admired 
on the strength of his reputation. If his shade could 
have revisited the garden, and seen the front in the time 
of Louis Napoleon, he would probably have found more 
pain than pleasure in the knowledge that his name was 
connected with it at all. The whole of his work, even 
including the central pavilion, was altered by subse- 
quent architects till the beauty and grace of it were 
effectually taken away. Delorme's building consisted 
simply of a ground-floor and an upper story which was 
lighted by beautiful dormer windows, with rich stone 
panels inserted between them. Above these rose a 
well-pitched roof, and care, of course, was bestowed 
upon the chimneys. But the most important feature" 
in Delorme's design was the pavilion (he only lived to 
erect one, in the centre of his front). The basis of this 
pavilion was a strong square mass two stories high, 
with a central doorway between two pairs of columns, 
and a window above it, also between two pairs of col- 
umns. The whole square mass was surrounded by a 
balustrade at the top, and there was a large round dome 



88 Paris. 

standing upon an elegant arcade and accompanied by- 
four small domes, occupying the angles of the square 
mass beneath. These satellites were supported on 
arches like the great dome, and on the top of the great 
dome was a lantern, also on little arches. The windows 
in the front were set in pairs near the pavilion and at 
the extremities, but between these pairs were three sin- 
gle windows ; ^ the composition, as a whole, was extremely 
elegant, and, though quite palatial and fit for a queen, 
it was neither cumbersome nor pretentious. If the 
architect had lived, and if the queen had been richer, 
they would have completed a quadrangle measuring 
about 270 metres by 168 in that manner, but with cor- 
ner pavilions, one of which was erected by Jean BuUant 
on the south side after Delorme's death, which occurred 
in 1570, after he had worked eight years for Catherine 
de Medicis. 

As the quadrangle was never completed, only one 
side of it having been built, the palace was found to 
be too small in later reigns, and so it was increased in 
length and in height, as I shall have to explain shortly, 
and Delorme's work was spoiled by heavy superposition. 
He had chosen the Ionic order as more feminine than 
the Doric, because the palace was for a lady. He him- 
self gives this reason, the Ionic having been employed 
for the Temples of Goddesses. At the same time he 
gave the palace an air of elegance of which it was after- 
wards deprived. 

It is remarkable that Catherine hardly used the 
1 This description is from what is now the Place du Carrousel. 



The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 89 

Tuileries. It appears to be certain that she only went 
there as people go to a summer-house, for a few hours 
at a time, or, at most, for a very short stay, and that the 
palace was not even furnished, as the officers of her 
household sent on each occasion the furniture that she 
required, and had it removed when she was gone. The 
architectural works were completely abandoned by 
Catherine in 1572; either she was tired of her hobby, 
or there may be some truth in the commonly repeated 
tradition that she was frightened away from the Tuile- 
ries by the prediction of a fortune-teller.^ 

Some readers will remember the large space behind 
the Tuileries, between the palace and the railings across 
the Place du Carrousel. In recent times the space was 
nothing but an arid desert of sand, very useful for 
reviewing troops, but as monotonous as a barrack-yard. 
In the early days of the palace this was occupied by a 
beautiful garden, and even before the building of the 
palace was begun a fine garden, in the formal taste of 
the time, had been made to the west, on the ground 
occupied by the present garden of the Tuileries. There 
were six great straight walks going from end to end, 
and these were crossed by eight narrower walks at 
right angles ; the beds were consequently all rectan- 
gular, and even within the beds the same rectangular 

1 The story is in the guide-books, so it is scarcely necessary to repeat 
it ; but to save the reader the trouble of a reference I may say that the 
fortune-teller tried to be agreeable to her Majesty by predicting for her 
a quiet end " near St. Germain," as the Tuileries was in that parish. 
Catherine avoided the palace afterwards to prolong her chances of life, 
yet died near St. Germain after all, as the priest who attended her bore 
that name. 



90 Paris. 

system was carried out in the subdivisions. At a later 
period, while the stone borders of the beds were pre- 
served, there was a violent reaction against angles inside 
them, and the most intemperately curved flourishes 
were substituted. I have no doubt that this intem- 
perance in curvature was the direct consequence of the 
straight-line system which had created a great hunger 
for curves. In Catherine's original garden there was 
not a single curve of any kind except the semicircle of 
the echo. With regard to the general principle of the 
formal French garden, it may be defended as a suit- 
able, accompaniment to symmetrical architecture. Such 
gardens, when of great size, are wearisome in the ex- 
treme; but a small one is valuable close to a building, 
as a sort of extension of the building itself upon the 
ground. 

The new palace of the Tuileries had been so much 
neglected that when Henri IV. came to it he found it 
already nearly ruinous. He was one of the great 
building sovereigns ; the constructive instinct was strong 
in him from the beginning, so of course the unfinished 
condition of the Tuileries excited him to architectural 
effort. Unfortunately for the future artistic consistency 
of these great palatial buildings, he conceived the idea 
of uniting the Tuileries to the Louvre by a long gallery 
on the river-side, which of course involved from the 
first the necessity of a corresponding line of building 
on the north, along what is now the Rue de Rivoli. 
The enterprise was so prodigious that nine sovereigns 
reigned over France before it was completed; and no 



The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 91 

sooner had it been finished by Louis Napoleon than 
the incongruousness of old and new made him decide 
to build the Tuileries over again. If Henri IV. had 
simply confined himself to carrying out the first inten- 
tions of Philibert Delorme by building the whole of 
that architect's projected quadrangle, the result would 
have been charming. What he actually did spoiled 
the Tuileries completely; he built the Pavilion de 
Flore, which, by its great mass, made Delorme's dome 
too small for its central position, and the heavy archi- 
tecture of the long gallery, with its big pilasters from 
top to bottom, set an evil example for future work on 
the Tuileries. It is believed that Henri IV. built the 
long gallery for reasons of prudence, and that he de- 
sired to plan for himself a way of retreat in case of a 
popular attack on his palace of the Louvre. The reader 
is asked to remember that the Tuileries was still out 
of Paris, and that the wall existed still except where 
• it was pierced by the new gallery. Henri had a pri- 
vate garden between the Tuileries and the city wall, and 
special precautions were taken to secure the complete- 
ness of its privacy. 

It is an interesting fact that from the beginning the 
great gallery was used for works of art, while it served 
as a means of communication ; and it is also a remark- 
able proof of the interest taken by Henri IV. in the arts, 
that he lent the extensive series of rooms on the ground- 
floor to workers in painting, engraving, tapestry, and 
sculpture. These rooms appear indeed to have been 
employed as schools of art ; and French writers believe 



92 



Paris. 



them to have constituted at that time a sort of conserva- 
toire des arts et metiers, — a free school of fine and indus- 
trial art. 

When Henri IV. had done his work the edifice must 
have presented a strikingly awkward and unfinished 
appearance. Fastened on one corner of the quadran- 
gular Louvre was a mass of building going down to 
the quay, and from this the long gallery went to the 
Pavilion de Flore; the length of it not having been 
determined by any architectural consideration whatever, 
but simply by the distance which happened to exist 
between two different palaces. At the west end the 
appearance must have been most unsatisfactory. There 
was the big Pavilion de Flore, and a mass of building 
to connect it with the poor little palace of the Tuileries ; 
and on the other side there was nothing. Between the 
Tuileries and the Louvre lay a confusion of garden, 
ditch, wall, and various habitations. 

Henri IV. was able to walk under cover from one 
palace to the other in the last year of his life, but the 
device for escaping from the city did not save him 
from assassination. After him Louis XIII. went on 
with the work; but the great builder was Louis XIV., 
who was displeased with the one-sided appearance of 
the palace, and also with the extreme irregularity of the 
roofs. By that time the ditches and wall of Charles V. 
had been removed, and the east garden (called the 
Jardin de Mademoiselle') had been made into a desert; 
so on the 5th of June, 1662, the King held a great 
equestrian festival in the space between the Tuileries 



The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 93 

and the Louvre (but nearer to the Tuileries), from 
which that piece of ground has been called ever since 
then the Place du CafToiisd. The festival was a mixture 
of costume cavalcades and games ; the King himself 
took an active part in it, and so did the flower of 
French nobility. The minute accounts left by eye- 
witnesses make it certain that the scene was one of 
extraordinary splendor; but the architectural back- 
ground was so incomplete, that perhaps the King's 
resolution to take up the work may date from that 
very day. Nothing could be done to save the Tuile- 
ries of Philibert Delorme. A great northern pavil- 
ion, the Pavilion de Marsan, was erected to make a 
northern angle answering to the southern Pavilion de 
Flore ; and it was joined to the other buildings, but 
these were so disproportioned that it was thought 
necessary to raise some of them by adding another 
story (or more), and to bring the front more nearly 
to a level by building across its cavities. The central 
pavilion was raised a story, and a heavy dome with 
angular corners was substituted for the elegant round 
dome of the first architect. This was the Pavilion de 
I'Horloge, that we remember. 

I have said that the Tuileries consisted of nine 
masses of building. It may be convenient to remem- 
ber that the architect, Phihbert Delorme, only com- 
pleted three of these, — the central pavilion and two 
wings; Jean Bullant added a pavilion to the south. 
The architects of Henri IV. added two masses still 
farther to the south; those of Louis XIV. added 



94 Paris. 

three to the north, so that in his time the nine ulti- 
mately attained were already complete. It is difficult 
to see how his architects, Le Vau and d'Orbay, could 
have dealt effectively in any other way with the difficult 
problem before them, unless they had completely de- 
molished the old palace. The real blunder was not 
committed by them, but by Henri IV. and his archi- 
tects, Metezeau and" Du Cerceau, when they made 
the work of Louis XIV. an inevitable necessity of the 
future. 

We have clear evidence that in the time of Louis XIV. 
it was already intended to build the long northern 
side of the great square. An engraving by Israel 
Sylvestre, representing the famous equestrian festival, 
anticipates the future by showing the Pavilion de Marsan 
as already erected ; and not only that, but he even 
shows the beginning of what was afterwards done by 
Napoleon I. to unite the Tuileries to the Louvre. 

The Great Napoleon was not quite so passionately 
fond of building as Napoleon III., but he liked to leave 
his mark on Paris, and his military love of order and 
completeness was vexed by the confusion behind the 
Tuileries. Where the eastern garden once had been 
there were three spaces divided by hoardings, and also 
separated by hoardings from the rest of the Place 
du Carrousel, while there were a number of wooden 
booths within them, and a number of very ordinary 
houses just behind. It is surprising that preceding 
sovereigns should have tolerated such a state of things 
just behind their palace; and it is a remarkably apt 



The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 95 

illustration of the wise old French proverb, " Qui trap 
einbrasse, mal etreiut." The space included in the great 
scheme was so vast that it was never properly dealt 
with until our own time. Napoleon I. had two objects in 
view when he began his improvements : he first wished 
to keep people at some distance from the Palace for 
reasons of privacy and safety, and then he wanted 
a convenient place for small reviews of troops. He 
therefore cleared away all the hoardings and booths, 
and made an open gravelled space, which he sepa- 
rated from the Place du Carrousel with a railing. 
He also made it his business to clear away the 
houses and to build the north side according to 
the intentions of Louis XIV., in a plain, rather heavy 
style, with tall pilasters, suggested by the long gallery 
of the Louvre. 

The work done by Louis-Philippe was considerable, 
but principally in the interior. The details of these 
changes would not greatly interest the reader, and 
would scarcely be intelligible without a plan. They 
included a new grand staircase, a new great saloon, and 
the improvement of the Galerie de Diane, with other 
alterations, which placed the floors of a long series 
of state apartments on the same level. These rooms 
in the aggregate were eight hundred feet long, and 
the bill for these improvements reached the handsome 
sum of ^^211,656. 

Then came Louis Napoleon, who determined to 
complete the whole vast edifice of the united palaces. 
He had the builder's passion quite as strongly as either 



96 Paris. 

Henri IV. or Louis XIV. ; and during those years when 
nobody could resist his will, he indulged it to the utter- 
most. The greater part of his work belongs to the 
Louvre, as it lies east of the pavilions de Rohan and 
Lesdiguieres, but he did much to the Tuileries of Henri 
IV. He pulled down the Pavilion de Flore, and rebuilt 
it, -and he did the same for all that part of the long 
gallery that used to have long pilasters. In the execu- 
tion of this important work every opportunity for im- 
provement that was consistent with a respect for the 
original idea was seized upon with avidity. The long 
pilasters were abandoned, and the new work treated 
in stories, like part of the older Louvre, with much 
elegance of design and richness of sculptured detail. 
The Pavilion de Flore was in some respects more 
ornate than its predecessor, especially in the upper 
parts ; and on the whole it was a more lively com- 
position, with better contrasts of effective sculpture 
and plain wall surface. An unquestionable improve- 
ment was in the roofs, which were made rich enough 
in lead-work to accompany the sculptured ornaments 
of the walls. The tiresome length of monotonous 
gallery running eastward from the Pavilion de Flore 
was happily and intentionally broken by the large 
gateway called the GiiicJiets des Saints Pires, by the 
twin pavilions of that gateway, and the masses of 
building on each side of them, which are loftier than 
the roof of the gallery. Besides this, the space com- 
prised between the Pavilion de Flore and the Guichets 
is itself wisely interrupted by a minor pavilion rising 



The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 97 

above the cornice, though not above the roof. By 
these devices the great fault of the river front, inor- 
dinate length, is made less visible. As for perfection 
of detail, there has never been any epoch of French 
architecture in which the essentially national style was 
worked out with more thorough knowledge and skill 
than under Napoleon III. 

It is a constant pleasure to examine such good work- 
manship closely, to see what a remarkably high level 
the decorative sculptors have attained when none of 
them disgrace the rest. Much as we admire Gothic 
architecture, we have to acknowledge that the modern 
work on the Tuileries is what Gothic sculptors could 
never have accomplished. The renewal of the art by 
the study of Greek antiquity w^as a necessary prepara- 
tion for palatial work of this kind. 

It is ^ pity (from our present point of view) that 
Louis Napoleon did not remain in power long enough 
to rebuild the Tuileries with the help of M. Lefuel, who 
erected the new Pavilion de Flore. The new palace 
would, no doubt, have been lofty and massive enough to 
hold its own against the new buildings of the Louvre ; 
and the central pavilion, especially, would have been a 
stately and imposing Avork of great size and magnificent 
decoration. The intended imperial palace is, however, 
gone to the shadowy realm of the things that might 
have been. In the place it was to have occupied we 
have seen for some years a blackened ruin ; certainly 
one of the most beautiful and interesting ruins that 
ever were, and so impressive by its combination of dire 

7 



98 Paris. 

disaster with still visible traces of royal splendor that 
only a poet could describe it adequately. Meissonier 
has worked in it carefully, and his minutely faithful 
brush will preserve for posterity those fire-crumbled 
columns, those shattered walls on which were still to 
be seen strangely preserved spaces of gold and color, 
as in some ruin at Pompeii. Even the king's balcony 
was still there, and the sunset light, indifi"erent to 
human vicissitudes, refreshed its gilding in the summer 
evenings. 

What the Republic has done since its establishment 
may be told in a few words. The fire had destroyed 
the Pavilion de Marsan and much of the line of build- 
ing along the Rue de Rivoli. These have since been 
rebuilt, as magnificently as the new Pavilion de Flore 
and the new part of the great gallery on the water-side. 
There appears to be an intention of continuing the work 
in the same style as far as the Pavilion de Rohan, or 
perhaps of erecting some great hall to break the line, 
for the new work stops abruptly ; and as the new build- 
ing is much broader than the old, the walls can never 
meet. The architects of the new portion have avoided 
the heavy long pilasters of Napoleon I., and adopted 
the more elegant system of division in stories already 
so successfully carried out on the south. No decision 
has been arrived at yet (188.5) with regard to the space 
occupied by the destroyed buildings of the Tuileries. 
All that is certain is that nothing will be joined to the 
pavilions of Marsan and Flore, as these pavihons are fin- 
ished on three sides. The open space seems to call for a 



The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 99 

noble edifice of some kind, and it is probable that some 
public building will ultimately be erected there. If this 
is ever done, it will be highly desirable that it should be 
set further back towards the Louvre, so as to give to the 
two great pavilions the effect of advancing wings. This 
would do more than anything to relieve the great length 
and monotony of the garden front. 

Through all their errors and experiments the archi- 
tects of the Tuileries and Louvre have been developino- 
a style of architecture which, in its ultimate stage, is 
really imposing and palatial. The great pavilions are 
very nearly related to towers, and their steep square 
roofs are like truncated spires; but the idea is so com- 
pletely adapted to the needs of a palace that we forget 
its origin in mediaeval churches and fortresses. Such 
pavilions are useful and necessary in edifices where the 
lines of building are long. They serve as landmarks, 
and by their perspective they enable us to measure 
easily the scale of the whole edifice. The full maturity 
of this architecture has only been reached in the present 
generation. The new parts of the Tuileries are finer 
than the older work which they replace, — finer, not 
only as being more magnificent, but because, after so 
many experiments, the resources of that kind of art 
have come to be better understood. A contemporary 
French architect eminent enough to be employed on a 
national palace would naturally produce more elegant 
work than the old river-front of the long gallery or the 
alterations made under Louis XIV. The principles of 
this architecture having been settled, it has reached that 



lOO Paris. 

mature stage when nothing remains to be done but to 
perfect the apphcation of them in detail. 

I have not had space to speak of the historical inter- 
est of the Tuileries, and can only do so now on the con- 
dition of extreme brevity. The palace was never very 
long or very closely connected with the history of the 
monarchy. It is not at all comparable to Windsor in 
that respect. Henri IV. liked it, Louis XIV. preferred 
Versailles, Louis XV. lived at the Tuileries in his mi- 
nority. The chosen association of the palace with the 
sovereigns of France is very recent. Louis XVI. lived 
in it, and so did Charles X. and Louis-Philippe. The 
two Napoleons were fond of it, perhaps because it gave 
them a better appearance of sovereignty than a new 
residence could have done. The last inhabitant was 
the Empress Eugenie, as Regent, and her flight has a 
pathos surpassing the flights or last departures of other 
sovereigns, since we know that the palace was never 
again to be brightened by either royal or imperial 
splendor. 

The parliamentary history of the Tuileries is impor- 
tant, as it has been not only a palace, but a parliament 
house. In old times the royal stable was to the north, 
close to what is now the Pavilion de Marsan, and in the 
present Rue de Rivoli. The exercising-ground was in 
a long, narrow enclosure, which occupied the ground 
of that street as far as the Rue de Castiglione ; and at 
its western extremity there was a building called the 
manege, which served as a parliament house for the 
Assemblee Nationale, while Louis XVT. lived in his 



The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. loi 

apartments in the palace and rarely came out of them. 
In May, 1793, the Convention began to sit in a newly 
arranged parliament house within the walls of the 
palace itself, and for some time after that the palace 
included Government Offices of all kinds, so that the 
first rough-and-rude beginnings of popular government 
in France were carried on in the royal house itself. 
The reader may be reminded also that Napoleon's coup 
d'etat of the i8th Brumaire took place within the Tuile- 
ries, where Parliament was then sitting. The most im- 
portant events in the Tuileries have sometimes been 
simply the arrival of a courier with news, or its mere 
reception by the quiet-looking telegraphic wire. I was 
in Paris when that little wire brought to the Emperor's 
private cabinet in the Pavilion de Flore the terrible 
news about Maximilian. I stood with a friend and 
looked on the sunny outside of the great palace, and 
we said, " It is a dark day for Napoleon III." From 
that day everything went wrong with him till he was 
laid in the sarcophagus at Chiselhurst. 

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg have this in com- 
mon, that each was built by a queen, and that each of 
the queens was a Medicis. Marie de Medicis began 
her palace in 161 5. Unlike the elder edifice, it has pre- 
served at least its original character, but in order to 
obtain more room in the interior the garden front has 
been replaced by a new one farther out; and though the 
original style of the building has been carefully imitated 
its proportions have been inevitably destroyed. Un- 
luckily, too, the addition (begun in 1836 and finished in 



I02 Paris. 

1844) was of a nature to increase the only serious defect 
of the first design, which was the doubling of the south- 
ern pavilions. The first plan may be briefly described 
as follows : there was a quadrangle with one pavilion 
at each corner towards the street, but two pavilions at 
each corner (or very near it) towards the garden. The 
garden pavilions were so near each other as to lose the 
advantage of perspective and appear heavy. The en- 
largement carried out by M. de Gisors, Louis-Philippe's 
architect, consisted in constructing two new pavilions in 
the garden close to the four already existing, so that at 
the south end of the palace there are now six heavy 
pavilions, three on each side. The new ones were con- 
nected by a new front which gave great additional space 
inside for a library and senate-house ; but the result 
externally was to make the heavy end of the palace 
look heavier still. Nevertheless, as the building had to 
be enlarged to receive the senate, it is very difficult to 
see how any equivalent increase of size could have 
been conveniently obtained with so little deviation from 
the first design. The garden front is practically the 
same, the interior of the quadrangle is untouched, at 
least so far as this alteration is concerned, so is the 
street front, and it is only the east and west sides which 
are lengthened without any alteration in their style. 

The architecture of this palace is not at all compar- 
able, so far as the one quality of elegance is concerned, 
with the most beautiful parts of the Louvre and the 
Tuileries, but it is serious and dignified, and almost in 
faultless taste in its own grave way. It would be difficult 



The Tuileries and the^ Luxembourg. 103 

to find a more appropriate building for a senate-house. 
The situation is pleasant and easily accessible, while 
the great space of beautiful garden gives the palace a 
degree of quiet not always attainable in a great city, 
and which, we may suppose, ought to be favorable to 
legislative deliberations. It is thought more prudent, 
in France, not to have the two Chambers in one build- 
ing; and it was principally for this reason that a recent 
proposition to rebuild the Tuileries, as a great parlia- 
ment house for both Chambers, met with few if any 
adherents. 

The garden of the Luxembourg is a precious breath- 
ing-space for that part of Paris, and is still of fine 
extent in spite of its mutilation at the south end, one of 
the very few attempts at economy made by the Imperial 
Government. It has a great population of statues, in- 
cluding many portrait-statues of famous Frenchwomen ; 
but the charm of it in spring and summer is in the 
abundance of bright flowers, fresh well-watered grass, 
and graceful foliage. The reader must not expect from 
me any adequate description of a garden, as I greatly 
prefer wild nature to all gardens whatsoever; but if I 
were compelled to choose between the lawns and alleys 
of the Luxembourg and a dusty street pavement, I would 
bear with the artificiality of the horticulturists.-^ 

1 I have said nothing of the interior, which is inaccessible to the public, 
with the exception of the galleries, about which there is nothing in the 
slightest degree remarkable, except some of the pictures and statues 
which they contain, and which lie outside the scheme of these papers. 



VI. 

THE LOUVRE. 

THE present writer once met, in Paris itself, with 
a very prosperous manufacturer from Yorkshire, 
who was not at all aware that there were any pictures 
in the Louvre. He considered it " a good, large build- 
ing," but had never heard of its connection with the fine 
arts; and it is believed that he returned to his native 
county without having visited the interior. 

This case, among visitors to Paris, is no doubt very 
exceptional, and there are even great numbers of people 
in the world who have never been to Paris, and are yet 
perfectly aware that the Louvre is a palace of the fine 
arts. For myself, so far as memory can go back into 
the hazy land of childhood, I can still recover the dim 
grandeur of the as yet unknown Louvtc, a palace of 
colossal, fantastic architecture, like a dream, with end- 
less halls filled with solemn, sombre pictures in heavy 
gilded frames. To see the reality was the longing of 
my youth, and when at last I found myself in that inter- 
minable gallery of Henri IV., it seemed as if the whole 
earth could not offer a delight so glorious. 

Meanwhile — and in this I resembled nearly all other 
English tourists — I knew nothing of the noble castle 



The Louvre. 105 

which the present Louvre had replaced. It seemed to 
me that the building had been made entirely as a mu- 
seum for works of art, chiefly pictures, and that nothing 
of any consequence had ever stood upon the ground it 
now occupied. Deeply interested in all remains of the 
Middle Ages that were to be seen in my native island, 
and passionately mediaevalist at heart (for all young 
people who care at all about the past are enthusiasts for 
some particular epoch), I little dreamed that one of the 
most romantic royal castles that ever existed once stood 
on the ground now occupied by chilly halls of antique 
sculpture. Such a castle, if its ruins yet rose on some 
lonely height by the Seine, would be visited by every 
tourist, and sketched by every landscape-painter ; but 
as it had the misfortune to be enclosed within the walls 
of a very great city, where the past is effaced to make 
way for the present, as accounts are sponged from a 
slate, not a stone is left standing, and only the learned 
have measured its site or counted its lordly towers. Yet 
the time when they were new and perfect, with conical 
roofs and gilded vanes, is not exceedingly remote from 
us in the great past of history; and if they could have 
been simply left undemolished, even without repair, 
we shoufd still have had an unrivalled example of the 
fortress-palace of the Middle Ages. The buildings 
formed an oblong court with round towers at the angles 
and in the middle of the sides, while nearly in the centre 
of the court stood a massive round keep, and to the 
south and east were well-defended gateways. All this 
was moated, and on the side towards the river were 



io6 Paris. 

other walls and towers, the last of which maintained a 
threatened existence down to the seventeenth century. 

The origin of the word Loitvre is believed to be a 
Saxon word, Lcowar or Lower, which meant a fortified 
camp. Littre, however, does not go so far as this, but 
contents himself with the base-Latin bipara or hipera, 
which was a subsequent creation as a latinized form of 
louve. Surely no two words could be more distinct 
than louve and louvre, while loiver (pronounced, of 
course, by all French people as lower') is a very near 
approximation to the name of the modern palace. Nor 
is there any reason to imagine a connection between 
the castle of Philippe-Auguste and a she-wolf, whereas, 
in its scheme of fortification, it bears a striking resem- 
blance to a Prankish moated camp. In " Paris a travers 
les Ages" M. Fournier borrows a drawing of one of these 
camps from Viollet-le-Duc's " Dictionary of Architec- 
ture," and the resemblance of its plan to that of the 
Louvre Castle is most striking. It stands near a river, 
which defends one of its sides; it is moated just as the 
Louvre was ; the central round tower is placed in the 
great enclosure precisely in the same position ; the gate- 
ways are in the same places, and the principal part of the 
fortress is withdrawn somewhat from the river, with an 
extra defence towards the river-side, exactly as in the 
Louvre Castle. There seems, then, to be no reason for 
doubting that the name of the present picture-gallery is 
due to the early use of its site for military purposes. 

Although nothing of the Louvre Castle is now visible 
from the exterior, there still exists a small remnant of it 



-v/ 













The Louvre. 



107 




DETAILS BY PIERRE LESCOT IN THE QUADRANGLE. 



enclosed within the modern palatial buildings. There 
is a considerable piece of the old wall in the Salle des 
Cariatides, and even a small corkscrew staircase which 
belonged to the old castle. 



1 08 Paris. 

The transformation of the castle into a palace began 
long before the present Renaissance palace was thought 
of. The first step was a consequence of the enclosure 
of the Louvre within the walls of Paris. Under Philippe- 
Auguste it had been outside, under Charles V. it was with- 
in the wall; and therefore, being no longer a fortress 
dependent on its own strength for resistance, it could 
be made more habitable without danger. Charles V. 
increased its height for the purpose of giving more 
room, and made great alterations in the arrangement of 
the apartments. Under that sovereign the Louvre still 
retained all the appearance of a feudal castle. The 
moat still surrounded it, and all the towers, including 
the great keep, were still in their places ; but the gen- 
eral aspect was richer and more elegant than before, 
the towers were loftier, the masses of building between 
them had become more spacious, and some new and 
graceful domestic architecture had been added within 
the courtyard. Lovers of books remember this epoch 
in the history of the Louvre in connection with the royal 
library which was established there. It is unnecessary 
to observe that even a royal library in the fourteenth 
century was but a small collection ; and yet if that 
library of Charles V. could have been preserved to our 
own day, few collections would have been more valued 
by the curious. Some rooms in a particular tower were 
set apart for it, two rooms at first, and afterwards a third 
above them, the whole containing rather more than 
nine hundred volumes. The collection was afterwards in- 
creased, and amounted in 1410 to 1,125 volumes, many 



The Louvre. 109 

of which were afterwards lent or lost; and it is said that 
the Duke of Bedford carried off the remainder with him 
to England, after a sort of purchase, in 1429. 

After being a splendid Gothic palace the old castle 
of the Louvre was almost entirely abandoned by the 
French sovereigns, and was employed as a prison and 
an arsenal. Then succeeded a long period of utter con- 
fusion, during which the new Renaissance palace was 
gradually coming into existence, while the remnants of 
the Gothic castle were devoured one after another, look- 
ing more and more miserable as less remained, till the 
wonder is that so late as Callot's time anything should 
have been preserved at all. 

The appearance of Francis I. upon "the scene is the 
doom of the old castle. With the help of an inven- 
tive and tasteful architect, Pierre Lescot, he began the 
Louvre that we know, — colossal in scale, magnificent, 
palatial, — utterly different in all ways from the domestic 
architecture of the great building sovereigns who pre- 
ceded him ; a building of which Philippe-Auguste and 
Charles V. could have had no conception whatever ; a 
wonderful result of the study of antiquity, and of its 
influence coming to the French through the Italian 
mind. 

What a strange revolution it is, how radical, how com- 
plete ! The beautiful and picturesque French Gothic 
cast aside as barbarous, and, in its place, not at all a 
dull imitation of the antique,^ but rather a new modern 

1 It is curious that Frenchmen in the time of Francis I. always spoke 
as if the new style were simply an imitation of the antique. They did not 
realize the fact that it was something more. 



no Paris. 

art having its roots far away in the past of Greece and 
Rome, and drinking nourishment from those distant 
sources. Imagine a French sovereign brought so com- 
pletely under this new influence as not to care in the least 
for the beautiful Gothic art which had so delighted his 
ancestors ! Charles V. had taken an honest pride in his 
Gothic towers, his tapestried halls, his comfortable wain- 
scoted parlors, the round rooms where his books were 
kept ; we know that he was proud of them because he 
showed the place himself to the Emperor. Had the 
old Louvre castle come down to our own times, it would 
have been restored in every detail with scrupulous 
accuracy, like Pierrefonds; and every mediaevalist in 
Europe would have visited it. Paris would have pre- . 
served it, as she now preserves the Hotel de Cluny or 
the Sainte Chapelle. But Francis I. did not care about 
it in the least. Everything Gothic had gone completely 
out of fashion, and whatever he built was to be in the 
new Renaissance manner. He therefore deliberately 
began certain buildings at the Louvre which must, of 
necessity, either establish a permanent incongruity, or 
compel his successors to remove every fragment of the 
old castle. If any Parisian of those days yet held the 
Gothic times in affection, he must have foreseen regret- 
fully the ultimate consequences of this new departure. 
" Ceci tuera cela" he must have said to himself. Con- 
temporary expressions of regret have come down to 
our own times; especially for the great tower, which 
was first demolished. After that the old castle seemed 
to take a new lease of existence. It was furbished up 



The LoiLvre. 1 1 1 

thoroughly to receive the Emperor Charles V. The 
scene of the well-known picture by Bonnington of the 
King and the Emperor visiting the Duchess d'Etampes 
was probably in the old Louvre.^ 

The new structure was begun in a very strange man- 
ner. The first part of it erected was a great classical 
pavilion, occupying the site of the southwest corner 
tower; and from this went a line of classical building 
as far as the Gothic southeastern tower, which was pre- 
served. It is impossible to conceive an effect more incon- 
gruous than that of these huge new buildings introduced 
into an old Gothic castle of moderate dimensions. 

Francis I. did little more than decide the fate of the 
old Louvre by introducing the new fashion. His suc- 
cessors went on with the work ; and the progress of it 
may be followed, reign after reign, till the last visible 
fragment of the Gothic castle had been ruthlessly carted 
away. The northeastern and southeastern round towers 
are still to be seen in Israel Sylvestre's etchings done in 
the year 1650. It is very remarkable that the short 
building which connects the Louvre with the long gal- 
lery on the water-side, and which now contains the 
Galerie d'Apollon, should have been first erected, as 
well as a considerable portion of the long gallery itself, 
when the great square had as yet made no approach to 
completion. The scheme appears to have been from 
the beginning of the most confused kind. A liking for 
the water-side, and a consequent tendency to build in 
that direction, appear to have entirely overruled what- 

1 An etching from the picture by Flameng appeared in the "Port- 
folio " for January, 1873. 



112 Paris. 

ever intention there may have been to carry out a de- 
cided plan. As soon as the erection of the Tuileries 
had been decided upon, the notion of a long gallerj'- 
from one palace to the other began to fix itself in 
royal minds, and this long before the Louvre itself 
was finished. Charles IX. began the long gallery at 
his mother's instigation, and when Henri IV. finished 
it, neither the Tuileries nor the Louvre presented any- 
thing like a complete appearance. It is the strangest 
story! Image an English sovereign, too poor to com- 
plete either Buckingham or St. James's palace, spend- 
ing vast sums in a line of building to connect them ! 
The conduct of Catherine de Medicis is more wonder- 
ful still, for when neither the Tuileries, nor the Louvre, 
nor the connecting gallery, was finished, she began 
(with these three huge enterprises on hand) a new 
and most costly palace in a different part of Paris. 

While the long gallery was slowly proceeded with, 
and the great new buildings had gone no farther than 
the western side of the great quadrangle, there was a 
confusion of buildings round about these great struc- 
tures which it is surprising that a powerful sovereign 
could tolerate. The rulers of France, in the midst of 
the most gigantic plans, lived surrounded by eyesores. 
It has been supposed that Henri. IV. intended to clear 
the ground and embellish it with a garden, but he did 
not live long enough. Vast as is the Louvre that we 
know, it is as nothing in comparison with the prodigious 
scheme imagined by Richelieu and Louis XIII. ; a 
scheme which, though never carried out, gave a very 



The Louvre. 113 

strong impulse to the works, and insured the completion 
of the present building, at least in a subsequent reign. 
It is probable that of all palace-building ever seriously- 
imagined by a prince, the Louvre of Louis XIIL was 
the most colossal. If the palace contemplated by him 
had been carried out, it would have extended to the Rue 
St. Honore, and included four great quadrangles of the 
same size as the present quadrangle, which, in its turn, 
is four times the size of the old castle of Philippe- 
Auguste. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of 
royal living than the great increase of scale that came in 
with the Renaissance. In the old Gothic times kings were 
contented with houses of moderate size, and with the 
exception of the great hall where the retainers assem- 
bled, the rooms were seldom very large ; but no sooner 
had the Renaissance revolutionized men's ideas, than 
kings everywhere suddenly discovered that vastness was 
essential to their state. In France this new idea began 
with Francis I., and it is curious to observe how it 
worked out its full consummation. He began, as we 
have seen, with a spacious royal pavilion in the place of 
a narrow round tower. After him, the long gallery was 
conceived and executed. Then Louis XIIL imagined 
an immensity, which he only partially executed ; finally, 
Louis XIV., still preoccupied by the same idea of huge- 
ness, imagined another immensity, but this time outside 
of Paris, — at Versailles, — and executed it. Thus at 
length the new demon of the colossal got satisfied. 

Happily for the Louvre, Louis XIV. interested him- 
self in it before he engulfed his millions at Marly and 



114 Paris. 

Versailles. While still quite young he felt urged to set 
to work by the provokingly incomplete appearance of the 
palace. Although Louis XIII. had demohshed the last 
towers of the Louvre Castle, he had not done very much 
towards the completion of the palace. Only two sides 
of the quadrangle — the western and the southern — 
were as yet erected. Louis XIV. determined to build 
the two others, and as he had a clever and laborious 
architect at his disposal, the work advanced rapidly. 
We see Le Van's work at the present day in the interior 
of the courtyard ; but outside, especially towards the 
river, it has been modified or concealed. The story of 
this able architect, and his labors and tribulations, is 
one of the most pathetic in the history of the fine arts. 
It appears to be the doom of great architects, from the 
earliest times to our own, to be plagued by their em- 
ployers, and compelled either to modify their plans or 
abandon them ; but few have had to bear such mortifi- 
cations as Le Vau. The reader no doubt remembers 
that eastern end of the Louvre where the great colon- 
nade is. That was the beginning of his troubles. He 
had made his plans for that part of the outside, which, 
in his opinion, was of paramount importance, and had 
even begun its actual construction, when Colbert became 
superintendent of public works, and put a stop to it. 
Rival architects were appealed to for their opinion, and 
of course they all condemned Le Vau, who up to that 
time had been preferred to them. Not satisfied, how- 
ever, with their propositions, or not feeling himself 
competent to decide among so many divergent pro- 



The Louvre. 1 1 c 

fessional schemes, Colbert sent their drawings to Rome 
to liave the opinion of the Itahan architects of the day. 
In those days Itahan architects were as firmly convinced 
that nobody but themselves knew anything about archi- 
tecture, as are the French painters of the present day 
that English artists cannot have any knowledge of 
painting; so their decision might have been accurately 
foretold. They simply condemned everything that was 
sent to them, and said that the French sovereign stood 
in need of a real architect, who must of course be an 
Italian. Louis XIV. allowed himself to be dictated to 
by men who were supposed to be the leaders of Europe 
in architectural matters; and he engaged the famous 
Bernini, who came to Paris animated by such a sense of 
his own importance that he not only treated Le Vau 
and his plans as non-existent, but claimed the right to 
remodel the entire edifice without regard to the inten- 
tions of the earlier architects, Pierre Lescot and Ee 
Mercier. Everything in Bernini's project was to be 
subordinate to stately architectural effects. The con- 
venient arrangement of the interior was of no conse- 
quence to him, and it is said that he even failed to 
provide for the comfortable accommodation of the sov- 
ereign. Notwithstanding these very strong objections 
to Bernini, he seems to have imposed himself for awhile 
so that works in stone and mortar were actually com- 
menced under his superintendence. Bernini was treated 
like a prince, — paid, lodged, and served magnificently; 
but he did not produce a satisfactory impression, and 
many French influences united themselves against him, 



1 1 6 Paris. 

so on his departure to winter in Italy it came to be 
understood that he should not return ; and he was con- 
soled with a sum of three thousand louis d'or, and a life 
pension of twelve thousand livres for himself and twelve 
hundred for his son. 

Then came a very strange thing in the history of the 
Louvre. Claude Perrault, a doctor of medicine and 
amateur architect, had elaborated a plan of his own for 
an east front, but had carefully refrained from putting it 
forward when the plans of the professional architects 
were sent to Italy, to be condemned by the national 
prejudice of the Italians. When Perrault's plan was 
shown to Louis XIV., the King had had enough of 
foreign opinion, and even of professional home opin- 
ion, and was in a humor to judge by himself. He 
had only two projects left to choose between, — that of 
Le Vau (modified and enriched) and the new one pro- 
posed by Perrault. Unfortunately for poor Le Vau 
there was a stateliness in Perrault's colonnade which 
pleased the pompous mind of the great King, so it 
was adopted with very little regard to suitableness. 
The final discomfiture of Bernini was most fortunate for 
the Louvre in one respect, — it saved the great quad- 
rangle which Bernini wanted to spoil in various ways, 
especially by putting huge staircases in the four cor- 
ners; but though the interior of the quadrangle was 
saved, it cannot be said that the adoption of Perrault's 
plan was by any means an unmixed benefit. The east 
front does not really belong to the edifice ; it is merely 
stuck on, and when it was built the fatal discovery 



The Louvre, 117 

was made that it did not fit. Surely this cannot have 
been a mistake, in the common sense of the word, 
as a joiner makes a mistake of an inch in a piece of 
wood. Perrault's front was more than seventy feet 
too long for the building it was to be applied to. He 
must have known this. Most probably he was deter- 
mined to have his fine long colonnade at all costs, 
and so deliberately exceeded the measurements at each 
end, regardless of the consequences, which were suffi- 
ciently serious. It became necessary to advance the 
river front farther towards the river. It was quite new. 
The architect who had built it, Le Vau, was still alive, 
yet the huge extravagance of building another, to 
mask it, had to be committed. This was the last 
drop of bitterness in the cup of sorrow served to 
Le Vau in his old age. 

The consequence of Perrault's audacity is that the 
buildings on the south side of the quadrangle are much 
thicker than those on the other sides. It was not 
thought necessary to advance the north front in the 
same way, but the length of Perrault's colonnade made 
it necessary to build a projecting mass at the northeast 
corner. The external north front always seemed to 
have received less attention than the others, though 
now, in consequence of the much-frequented Rue de 
Rivoli, it is as much seen as the colonnade itself 

The colonnade has a great reputation, and is no 
doubt majestic and noble in its proportions, but it is 
wonderful how little it seems to belong to the building. 
This effect of being something separate is felt more 



ii8 Paris. 

strongly when we come out of the quadrangle by the 
east entrance, and then look back on Perrault's front. 
In all the alterations executed about the palaces nobody 
has ever touched that front; and, indeed, it is evidently 
one of those works that do not admit of change. Like 
all severely classical conceptions, it is an organic whole 
from which every diminution would be mutilation, and 
to which every addition would be an excrescence. 

The western front of the Louvre remained extremely 
simple until the time of Napoleon III., when a feeble 
attempt was made to decorate it with some applied or- 
nament, so that it might hold its own against the new 
buildings ; and when this was found to be impossible it 
was masked by a new front of adequate magnificence. 
Until our own time this west front looked upon an 
accidental agglomeration of the commonest dwelling- 
houses, which filled what are now the Squares du 
Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. The completion 
of the great project, by which the Tuileries and the 
Louvre were to be united, has led to the clearance and 
embellishment of these spaces. 

One of the greatest difficulties about the union of the 
two palaces was that they were neither parallel nor at 
right angles to each other. The degree of inclination is 
such that if a line drawn along the front of the Tuileries, 
and another along the west front of the Louvre, were 
both prolonged northward, they would meet within the 
walls of Paris near La Chapelle. Every architect who 
had studied the union of the palaces had proposed 
some means of hiding this defect. In 1810 no less 




QUADRANGLE OF THE LOUVRE, WITH THE STATUE OF FRANCIS I., 
PLACED THERE IN 1 855, AND SINCE REMOVED. 



The Louvre. no 

than forty-seven different projects were submitted to 
the Government. That of Percier and Fontaine was 
accepted, but never carried out. Those architects in- 
tended to hide the defect by carrying a hne of building 
from north to south, straight across the middle of the 
Place du Carrousel. When Napoleon III. came into 
power he found Visconti in office as architect of the 
Louvre, and Visconti had another plan, which was exe- 
cuted. If the reader will refer to any recent map of 
Paris, he will understand Visconti's scheme at a glance. 
It consisted in the creation of a new court as wide as 
the inside of the old quadrangle, but longer, and open 
at the west end, in the direction of the Tuileries. Be- 
hind these massive lines of building are smaller enclosed 
courts to the north and south, the irregularity of which 
is only seen by the few who visit them. By this means 
it was hoped that the want of parallelism between the 
Tuileries and Louvre would be in a great measure con- 
cealed ; but, unfortunately, the new buildings only made 
it more visible, by directing the eye towards the Tuile- 
ries in such a manner as to show plainly that the Pavilion 
de I'Horloge was not in the middle of the view. Again, 
it is easily seen from the Place du Carrousel that the 
new buildings do not occupy the same space on the 
north and the south sides. If, however, they are a 
failure as a means of hiding a defect, they have certain 
merits of their own. Considered in themselves, as ex- 
amples of magnificent palatial architecture, they deserve 
little except praise ; but in their relation to older build- 
ings round the Place du Carrousel they were from the 



1 20 Paris. 

first objectionable, because their imposing size and rich 
ornamentation made everything else look thin, and low, 
and poor. To borrow a term employed by painters, 
the huge Visconti buildings simply " killed " the Tuile- 
ries. Their erection was the doom of the older palace 
by making a grander one a necessity of the future. The 
new pavilions Richelieu, Denon, Turgot, and Mollien, 
being very splendid in themselves and near together, 
made the Pavilion de I'Horloge of the Tuileries look 
miserable and lonely. Besides this, the massive lines 
of building that connected Visconti's pavilions, with 
their richly carved arcades surmounted by colossal 
statues, and their numerous groups of sculpture on the 
balustrades in front of the roof, made the long wing 
built (or begun) by Napoleon L look fit for little else 
than a barrack-yard ; and so we see it already replaced, 
in great part, by a much more magnificent structure, 
which will certainly join Visconti's buildings ultimately 
at the Pavilion de Rohan. It is narrated that Napo- 
leon III., after gazing one day with a friend at the new 
buildings from a window in the Tuileries, turned away 
with a look of disappointment, and said, " If I listened 
to my own feelings I would begin the whole thing over 
again." There are limits, however, even to the extrava- 
gance of a Napoleon III. ; and though he might easily 
have squandered as much in other and less visible ways, 
he could hardly indulge in such a public repentir as the 
reconstruction of his own Louvre. 

The most obvious defect of Visconti's Louvre, con- 
sidered in itself, is that the two great fronts which face 



The Louvre. 121 

each other across the gardens are so near that the spec- 
tator cannot retire far enough to see them completely. 
They can, in fact, only be seen in all their majesty 
diagonally from the Place du Carrousel. There the 
effect is stately in the extreme, and very original ; there 
being, I believe, no other palace in the world which 
offers a perspective of the same kind. Another great 
merit of the new buildings is that as they enclose a con- 
siderable space with their hidden courts and cover a 
large extent of ground, \}i\Q.y fiirnisJi the space between 
the Tuileries and Louvre better than some other pro- 
jects would have furnished it; and this is a merit of 
some importance, considering the distance between the 
two palaces. Indeed, Visconti's plan seems to bring 
the Louvre, by continuing it, as far as the pavilions 
Turgot and Mollien. 

Visconti's buildings have been frequently and severely 
criticised as " overcharged with ornament." This is an 
unintentional compliment, for the fact is that his walls 
are extremely plain, incomparably plainer than the new 
long gallery of the Louvre, or the new building running 
east of the Pavilion Marsan. The great effect of rich- 
ness in Visconti's work is due to the art with which he 
lavished ornament on certain conspicuous places, espe- 
cially on his pavilions. A juster criticism is that his 
work is heavy. No doubt it is massive rather than 
graceful, but its appearance of enduring strength is not 
out of place in a public edifice ; and though some parts 
of the old Louvre are more delicate and charming, none 
are more imposing. The abundance of statues has been 



1 2 2 Paris. 

blamed, but tliey are not more numerous than in me- 
diaeval architecture, and they are better detached. 

A simpler plan than that adopted by Visconti would 
have been to dissimulate the want of parallelism between 
the palaces by making t^vo or three large quadrangles, 
and losing the radiation in the thickness of the buildings 
between; but such a plan would have lost the majestic 
effect of space and distance which it was Visconti's 
desire to preser\"e. By his plan the pavilion of the old 
Louvre could be seen distinctl}' from the central pavilion 
of the Tuileries. 

The united palaces make so vast a building, that it 
has been found necessary to give a distinct interest to 
certain parts. Thus the openings towards the Pont des 
Saints Peres, called Les Gtiichcts des Saints Peres, form 
an architectural composition in themselves ; and that 
part of Visconti's Louvre which is opposite the Palais 
Royal is a distinct work, composed for that place and 
not repeated elsewhere. It is highly ornamented, and 
contrasts strongly in this respect with the simple work 
on each side of it. 

The sums of money expended on the Louvre and 
Tuileries defy all calculation. The palaces have not 
been erected according to any sound principles of econ- 
omy, but by a system of additions and alterations 
involving immense sacrifices. As the old castle was 
pulled down before it was really decayed, so many 
parts of the Louvre and Tuileries have been replaced 
prematurely. The river front erected by Le Vau and 
masked by Perrault is a case in point. Even the long 




perrault's colonnade, interior view. 



The Louvre. 123 

gallery and the Pavilion de Flore erected by Henri IV. 
cannot be considered to have lasted very long, as they 
had to be rebuilt in our own time. The greatest 
spender on these palaces was Napoleon III. Visconti's 
plans,^ when finished by Lefuel, had cost him sums 
greatly exceeding the first estimate of a million sterling. 
I believe that the total expenditure on the palaces in 
our time has reached at least four millions ; and if the 
older work could be accurately estimated in our money 
it would be equally costly. The total value of the pal- 
aces before the destruction of the Tuileries can scarcely 
have been less than ten millions sterling without their 
contents ; and the value of the site, with its vast area in 
the best part of Paris, is prodigious. 

I have little space to speak of the interior, and it is 
not a . part of my plan to attempt any description of 
works of art other than architectural. Many rooms in 
the Louvre are simply plain receptacles for interesting 
things, but others are interesting in themselves, espe- 
cially the old wainscoted rooms lined with delicately 
wrought wood-work from the chambers of the kings. 
The most sumptuous room is perhaps the Galerie 
d'ApoUon, with its elaborate ceiling, its tapestries in 
panels, and its collection of precious objects ; but the 
most imposing is the lofty saloji carre, gravely magnifi- 
cent, and realizing the grand ideas of Henri IV. As 
for the long gallery, it is too long to produce its due 
effect upon the mind, which would be equally potent if 
it were considerably shorter. It appears to be simply a 
1 Visconti died suddenly in his carriage in 1S53. 



1 24 Paris. 

very magnificent tunnel with pictures on the sides, and 
nothing near enough to be really visible at the ends. 
The mere sensation of being in an almost endless tunnel 
has a distracting effect upon the mind. A room of 
moderate dimensions, with a few pictures well isolated 
and well lighted, is much more favorable to the concen- 
tration of the faculties in study. The clever comic 
sketcher Robida has shown us the tramway which, 
according to him, will be established in that gallery 
next century. The idea is not unreasonable. A neat 
little carriage on rails, arranged like an Irish jaunting- 
car, would be a great convenience for the thousands of 
tourists who now wearily plod from end to end of that 
gilded and painted tunnel, with minds distraught and 
eyes that gaze on vacancy. 



VII. 

THE HOTEL DE VILLE. 

JUST at this present time (1885) the Parisian Hotel 
de Ville seems the most perfectly beautiful of mod- 
ern edifices, not only on account of the grace and inter- 
est of its design, but also because the materials are 
so irreproachable in their freshness and purity. It 
would be bold to assert such a thing positively, but it 
is very likely to be the simple truth that this building, 
just at present, is the fairest palace ever erected in the 
world. The reasons why this is likely to be true are 
the following. To be as perfect as the Hdtel de Ville 
is now, a building must be erected all together and with 
a certain rapidity ; but great edifices have usually come 
into being by fragments, so that the parts first erected 
had time to get old, dingy, and even ruinous before the 
plan was completed, while the modifications introduced 
by successive architects have in most cases been fatal 
to the unity of the work. I need not go farther for ex- 
amples than to the two great Parisian palaces that we 
have already studied. Neither the Louvre nor the 
Tuileries was ever seen as their first architects intended 
them to be. The palace of the Tuileries, in the whole 
course of its existence, was never at any time a com- 



126 Paris. 

plete and harmonious work. When it was harmonious 
(in the time of Catherine de Medicis) it was incom- 
plete, merely a beginning, and when it was complete 
(in the time of Louis-Philippe) it had long since ceased 
to be consistent and harmonious. The Louvre is better, 
but still it is a combination of three or four different 
architectural schemes, and it is spoiled externally, as a 
work of art, by being tacked on to a larger edifice, or 
collection of edifices. Now although the ruder kinds 
of architecture admit of an unlimited jumble of addi- 
tions, it is not so with the more refined. The highest 
kinds of architecture approach, in the strictness of their 
organization, to the higher animal forms. You cannot 
give an animal another limb, nor fasten him by suture 
to another animal, without producing a monstrosity like 
a five-legged calf or the Siamese twins. So it is in 
classical architecture of the best kind, and even (though 
not quite to the same degree) in the best Renaissance 
architecture. In Gothic, the virtue of unity has been 
less valued, for the Gothic architects themselves freely 
added excrescences to their buildings ; yet whenever 
even a Gothic work is in itself exquisitely complete, it 
cannot be so dealt with except at the cost of that exqui- 
site completeness. Any addition to the Sainte Chapelle 
would be the destruction of its peculiar beauty. 

Now the present Hotel de Ville (though the design, 
as I shall show presently, is a growth from an earlier 
design) is in itself a complete architectural conception 
carried out at once in all its parts. It is not, like 
the Tuileries of Philibert Delorme, a beautiful scheme 



The Hotel de Ville. 127 

spoiled before it was realized. And the material per- 
formance answers in all respects to the idea. The 
workmanship throughout is of that extreme perfection 
which is the pride of Parisian craftsmen. The stone is, 
just now, as fair and immaculate as a selected piece of 
Parian marble. It is almost as white as snow, and as 
faultless. It takes the most delicate sculpture as if it 
were a fine-grained wood, and the quality of its grain 
is so equal that an artist might sketch upon it as on 
drawing-paper. The only reproach that can be made 
against it is that the tone of the whole building is cold ; 
but it is hardly so in sunshine, and there is a beginning 
of mosaic decoration which promises enrichment of the 
only kind admissible on so delicate a structure. But 
not only is the stonework everywhere of the fairest and 
best, the roofs are perfect to the smallest ornament; 
and so elegant that although the building is on a great 
scale it seems more beautiful than vast, and impresses 
rather by an air of distinction, of aristocracy even, than 
by any display of power and wealth. It may seem 
strange to speak of aristocracy in connection with an 
edifice that is the very centre and council-hall of a 
mighty and sometimes turbulent democracy; but the 
word is not misapplied, from an artistic point of view, 
to a building so completely under the government and 
discipline of the best architectural authority, having 
under its command the best and most intelligently obe- 
dient labor. Such a building has no natural connection 
with tumult and disorder. The powers of anarchy did 
not produce it, could not have produced it. Nor is it 



128 Paris. 

either the product of Phihstine wealth. The cost of it 
will be about a million and a quarter sterling, yet it 
only comes to us as an afterthought that so much good 
work is costly. There is sometimes more of the self- 
assertion of bourgeois money in a citizen's private house 
than there is in this great palace. Ornament has been 
used sparingly, and what there is of it is chiefly figure- 
sculpture. The panels in the front are not carved but 
simply divided by mouldings, lozenge-shaped or cir- 
cular. The consoles under the niches between the win- 
dows of the central pavilion are very delicately carved, 
but the wall behind them is perfectly plain, and the 
windows themselves are surrounded by very simple 
mouldings. There is a little carving on the two taller 
pavilions on each side. Over the arches of the two 
beautiful dormer windows, near the clock, there is som.e 
graceful figure-sculpture; and above and about the 
clock itself is a fine central composition with colossal 
figures and a pediment with the ship of Paris. Yet 
even in this, the richest and most central part of the 
whole edifice, the ornament is by no means overcharged, 
and the figures are relieved by plain spaces of masonry, 
as a drawing is by its margin. Among the ornaments 
of the roof the most romantic are the men in armor, 
with lances, who stand on pedestals along the ridge. 
They are gilded, and produce a brilliant effect in strong 
sunshine, besides recalling the times when the Hotel de 
Ville was first erected. There are ten of them all 
together, — six on the central pavilion, and two on each 
of the pavilions to right and left. 




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The Hotel de Ville. 129 

It is very commonly supposed that a building has 
little influence upon the mind when it has no historical 
associations, but in the case of the present Hotel de 
Ville the gain is greater than the loss. It is a virgin 
building as yet, and may be judged fairly on its merits 
as a beautiful work of art. It is simply a palace which 
looks as if it were awaiting the arrival of a prince in 
a fairy-tale. It seems far too delicate to be in the 
midst of a populace like that of Paris ; and one who 
loves architecture can scarcely help wishing that it 
might be transported by magic some night far away 
in the woods and be safe from bullets and incendiarism. 
The ways by which a people attains to municipal liberty 
and parliamentary government are often so rough that 
the recollection of them gives pleasure only to the 
enemies of both. If the present building has no splen- 
did memories, if it has received no sovereign within 
its walls, and been the scene of no extravagant enter- 
tainments, rt is, at the same time, absolutely free from 
all revolting and horrible associations. No stormy 
councils have been begun in its chambers to end in 
bloodshed; no murder has been perpetrated on its 
threshold, nor have privileged spectators ever enjoyed 
from its windows the burning of heretics at the stake, 
or seen criminals torn limb from limb by four infuriated 
horses. And not only is the present edifice free from 
the horrors of history, but it is also free from its 
vulgarities. The wretched quarrels of yelling dema- 
gogues, jumping on tables and crushing pens and 
inkstands under their heels, have not, as yet, resounded 

9 



I30 



Paris. 



in a building that seems fit only for the presence of 
gentlemen. 

The present building is in its main features a repro- 
duction of that which existed before 1871, but it is 
not a slavish reproduction ; and a comparison between 
the two shows that the architect took the opportunity 
for introducing many improvements. What has been 
done may be explained to a certain extent as follows. 
Suppose that an artist makes a drawing, well composed, 




THE HOTEL DE VILLE IN I583. FROM A DRAWING BY JACQUES 

CELLIER. 

and in good general proportions, but still leaving room 
for improvement in other ways ; and then suppose that 
an artist of riper knowledge and more cultivated taste 
goes over the drawing, pencil in hand, and shows how 
the ideal which the first artist had in view may be 
approached more closely. He finds excellent inten- 
tions, to which full justice has not always been done. 
He says, " You might have made more of this idea ; 



The Hotel de Ville. 1 3 1 

you intended this part of your composition to be 
elegant, — it may be made more elegant still ; these 
details might be enriched, though without deviating 
from your intention ; " and while he talks in this way 
he revises the whole work with his pencil ; and some- 
how, without making any very obvious alteration, he 
gives it greater refinement, and makes it hold better 
together. I have not space to show in all ways how 
this has been done in the new Hotel de Ville, but I 
may mention one or two instances. The gateway 
pavilions (those that rise on each side of the central 
mass) had each of them a sort of encorbelled turret 
or bartizan, which, with excellent artistic judgment, 
had been placed to the right in one instance, and to the 
left in the other, so as to make each pavilion intention- 
ally lopsided and unsymmetrical in itself, yet forming 
an imperfect part of a perfect whole. The first archi- 
tect had the idea, which was excellent, but he strangely 
failed to make the most of it. He diminished the 
size of the turret in its uppermost story and gave it 
no roof! It is wonderful that he should have missed 
such an opportunity. The architect of the new build- 
ing has been careful not to miss it. He has carried 
the turrets up to the full height of the pavilions, and 
then given to each of them a delightfully elegant little 
roof of its own, carefully finished with an ornamental 
ridge and finials so as to avoid a pyramidal point, and 
imitate in little the roofs of the great pavilions. These 
turrets now occupy the same position that pretty chil- 
dren have in a family, and they give a charm and 



132 Paris. 

lig-htness to the whole edifice that could have been 
attained by no other means. Again, in the ornamental 
structure about the clock, and in the bell-turret, the 
architect has taken the old motives and made more 
of them. After every allowance has been made for 
the imperfect draughtsmanship of old engravers, it 
is evident from their testimony that these important 
and central parts of the Hotel de Ville, though the 
same in general intention as at present, were in old 
times much less elegant than they are now; and we 
know from drawings and photographs, if personal rec- 
ollection were insufficient, that many small improve- 
ments upon the edifice as it existed immediately before 
the Commune have been unobtrusively but effectively 
introduced into the new design. The corner pavilions 
are better finished than they were under Louis Napo- 
leon, and so it is all over the building. The intention 
has been to preserve the traditional forms, but quietly 
to take every opportunity of improving them. It is a 
new edition of an old book, not revised by the author, 
but by a respectful editor more skilful than the 
author himself 

It is curious that the front of the edifice, which 
seems to us so happily designed, should be the result 
of accident. The original plan included only the 
central mass with the clock and the bell-turret, and 
the two pavilions which flank it. The design was 
very pretty and complete in itself; but it was not im- 
posing by its size : and even such as it was the town had 
the greatest difficulty in carrying it into execution, and 



The Hotel de Ville. 133 

it lingered from reign to reign. Francis I. planned 
the Renaissance edifice; but although he employed 
a hundred workmen upon it, afterwards reduced to 
fifty, it was not very forward when he died. It was 
not finished even at the death of Henri IV. The build- 
ing was in a very imperfect state for seventy-two years, 
and remained imperfect afterwards. Nothing proves 
more clearly the immense inferiority of old to modern 
Paris in productive power, than the great difficulty 
experienced by the sovereigns and people of form.er 
times in getting forward with their architectural under- 
takings, which seem in almost every instance, except 
that of the Sainte Chapelle, to have been far too heavy 
for their resources. To the modern municipality the 
erection of such a building as the old Hotel de Ville 
would be a small matter. The present one, which has 
grown from its foundations in the lifetime of a child, 
is three or four times as vast as that which existed in 
the imagination of Francis I., and which he could not 
realize. 

The H6tel de Ville, the Tuileries, and the Palace of 
the Luxembourg, are all instances of enlarged buildings. 
If the reader has perused the article on those palaces, 
he will have observed that they were enlarged in differ- 
ent ways. The Tuileries grew by the addition of masses 
and pavilions, first on one side then on the other, and 
all (except the very earliest) out of proportion with the 
centre, which had to be enlarged afterwards. Then came 
a general levelling-up and alignement, the consequence 
being a piece of patchwork and mending which never 



1 34 Paris. 

presented the appearance of an artistic composition. 
The Luxembourg was enlarged in another way. It 
was already overloaded at one end by four heavy 
pavilions which stood too near each other, when 
Louis-Philippe, to get more internal accommodation, 
made the four into six by adding two others and 
advancing the front, thereby considerably increasing 
the defect of heaviness. In the case of the Hotel de 
Ville, on the contrary, the enlargement by the addition 
of masses of building to right and left, set a little 
back, and pavilions at the corners, coming forward, 
was done so judiciously, and with such a fine sense 
of what is suitable and proportionate in a great edifice, 
that although the present architects had the oppor- 
tunity of substituting a design conceived all at once, 
they have been perfectly satisfied with reproducing 
all the main features of the old building with its 
appendices. The truth is, that nobody could possibly 
know, unless he was told, that the wings were additions 
or appendices at all. It is the happiest instance of 
successful enlargement that I ever met with. In the 
interior the increase of dimensions was carried out 
by the addition of two new courts, one on each side 
the central quadrangle. All these courts in the new 
building are exquisitely finished. The two lateral ones 
have beautiful winding staircases, rich in sculpture, 
with open balusters and turret-roofs, — an idea which 
has descended from Gothic times and been adopted 
by the Renaissance with the addition of elegant orna- 
ment. The central court is on a higher level (access 



The Hotel de Ville. 135 

to it is had by stairs from the side-courts and the 
vestibule), and on occasions of great festivity it will 
probably be converted into a vast hall by the addition 
of a tent-roof. 

The festivities at the Hotel de Ville have long been 
celebrated for the combination of magnificence with 
good taste. The present writer remembers seeing the 
old building at its best many years ago at a grand ball 
given by the Municipality to Napoleon III. and Victor 
Emmanuel. He happened to be in the great court 
when the sovereigns ascended the stairs, and the com- 
bination of beautiful architecture with rich draperies, 
abundant illumination, and splendid costumes, made a 
spectacle hardly to be rivalled elsewhere, except in 
some Italian palaces. The scene in the great gallery 
was as splendid, but not so entirely outside of the com- 
monplace. The great gallery was converted for a short 
time into a throne-room ; and I happened to be at a 
little distance from the thrones on which sat the two 
potentates, — one of them at that time the most dreaded 
of European majesties, the other only king of Sardinia, 
a petty sovereign who had won recognition by sending 
troops to the Crimean war. The guests formed a lane 
all down the room, and the personages walked slowly 
along it, greeting those they knew. Since that night 
what changes ! The palace they came from is now the 
last remnant of a ruin; the municipal palace, then 
thronged by a crowd of guests, has since been reduced 
to ashes and replaced by an entirely new structure. 
The great Emperor, after defeat and humiliation, lies 



136 Paris. 

embalmed in a sarcophagus in England, the young hope 
of his dynasty by his side, and the prince whom he 
then patronized sleeps royally in the Pantheon at Rome, 
the first of the kings of Italy. The lives of both have 
now receded completely into the domain of history, and 
are as sure to be remembered in future ages as those of 
any other famous personages who have visited the old 
Hotel de Ville. Italy will never forget the rough but 
good-natured and hearty soldier who so often sacrificed 
his simple personal tastes to the duties of a more and 
more exalted station ; nor is France ever likely either 
to forget or forgive the statesman, at one time consid- 
ered so astute, the ultimate outcome of whose deep-laid 
schemes was the aggrandizement of her neighbors and 
the humiliation of herself. There are a hundred other 
associations with the Hdtel de Ville, which it would be 
easy to enumerate, but these are among the most re- 
cent. If the Republic lasts, it is not very probable that 
the new building will often be enlivened by the presence 
of crowned heads ; but the municipality will at least 
be able to hold its sittings without the uncomfortable 
anticipation of those requests for money which so 
frequently came from the French sovereigns to the 
provosts of Paris and the echevms of old. The only 
real inconveniences from which the modern munici- 
pality is ever likely to suffer are the excess of its own 
power and the temptations to its abuse. The Munici- 
pal Council has such great resources that it is constantly 
tempted to place itself in antagonism to the State. The 
two never work smoothly together for very long, and 



The Hotel de Ville. 137 

the notice of civic independence has taken such deep 
root in many minds that they are always ready to see 
infringements of it in the most ordinary acts of the 
National Government. 

Whatever of evil there may be in our own time, what- 
ever evil deeds may have been done during the Com- 
mune, men are certainly less barbarous than they were 
four or five hundred years ago. Executions are less 
cruel, prisoners are treated with more humanity. I 
have passed rapidly over the executions which took 
place formerly in the Place de Greve, the open space 
just before the Hotel de Ville, where they are making 
the new garden-squares, and where boys amuse them- 
selves with bicycles on the smooth asphaltum ; but if 
the reader wishes to thrill his nerves with horror, he 
will find nothing more terrible than the deliberate cru- 
elty of those executions in old times ; the simple mur- 
der by a discharge of musketry under the Commune 
was tender mercy in comparison. Our warfare, too, 
barbarous as it still remains, is not quite so horrible as 
in the middle of the fifteenth century, when hundreds 
of English prisoners were thrown into the Seine near 
the Hotel de Ville, with bound hands and feet, and 
drowned there in the Seine before the eyes of an un- 
pro testing populace. Let us confess frankly that, not- 
withstanding all the picturesque interest of past times 
so delightful to novelists and painters, they are terrible 
if studied seriously, — terrible if once we realize what 
they were; and there is no place in the world where 
we feel this horror of the past more strongly than on 



138 Paris. 

the Place de Greve, just before the lovely modern pal- 
ace which I have been trying to describe. The horror 
of that dreadful night in May, 1871, when the whole 
edifice and the houses opposite were in flames, does 
not really equal the horror of one quiet execution in 
the feudal times. The destruction of a certain amount 
of property however valuable, the loss of a certain num- 
ber of lives in a street . battle however passionate and 
sanguinary the conflict, are less odious than the quiet 
application of vindictive torture to a single unresisting 
victim. There are places in Europe where our best 
charity to the past is to forget it if we can, and this is 
one of them. Let us look hopefully to the future; 
and may this, the fairest municipal palace in the whole 
world, hear no harsher sounds than the discussions of 
citizens in council, and see no fiercer flame than the 
light of its own festal illuminations. 



VIII. 

THE PANTHEON, THE INVALIDES, AND THE 
MADELEINE. 

A S in a former article the two principal Gothic edi- 
-^^ fices in Paris were studied together, so in the 
present case the reader is invited to consider three of 
the principal Renaissance buildings at the same time. 
The first of these is a church, which has been employed 
alternately for divine worship and as a Walhalla for illus- 
trious Frenchmen, and which to the present day bears 
traces of both uses ; the second is a church which has 
become a mausoleum exclusively associated in the pop- 
ular mind with a great renown entirely unforeseen when 
the building was erected ; the third, again, was begun 
as a church, continued with the intention of making it 
a temple for military commemorations, and finally used 
for ecclesiastical purposes, while still preserving the 
external appearance of a Greek temple, modified by 
Roman and Gallic imitation. All these edifices have 
thus been strangely connected both with religion and 
with the vanities of human celebrity. All of them, 
again, have a similar architectural interest as modern 
experiments with antique architectural forms. 

It is one of the commonest of errors, among people 
who do not trouble themselves to keep chronology in 



140 Paris. 

mind, to connect Gothic architecture with Christianity 
by such an intimate association that they can hardly 
separate the two. Pointed arches and painted windows 
appear to them ecclesiastical and even religious, while 
classical architecture seems much more suitable for lay 
purposes. Nobody who has this prejudice can regard 
a Renaissance church with any fairness. The forms of 
the architecture in Renaissance churches are not exactly 
those with which the early Christians were familiar, but 
they are incomparably nearer to them than the Gothic 
forms. As Gothic work looks very old and ruinous 
(when it has not undergone restoration), we vaguely 
give it credit for great antiquity, while the real reason 
for its ancient appearance is because it is an exceedingly 
frail and unsubstantial kind of architecture, which, after 
a short time, requires incessant repair. If you divide 
in three parts the centuries which have passed since the 
foundation of Christianity, you will place Gothic archi- 
tecture, a French invention, in the third. It is, in fact, 
the most modern of all the really original styles, and 
one which was never associated with the early history 
of Christianity. There is, consequently, no religious 
reason for the preference of Gothic architecture for 
churches, unless it is found that pointed arches are 
more favorable to religious feelings than round ones, 
and the various fanciful columns and capitals of the 
Gothic builders more serious than the limited but well- 
studied inventions of the Greeks. 

The idea of the dome came to France from Italy, and 
it is unnecessary in this place to trace the architectural 



The Pantheon^ Invalides, and Madeleine. 141 

pedigree of the French Pantheon beyond its ancestor, 
St. Peter's at Rome, the common inspirer of western 
imitations. Soufflot, the architect of the Pantheon, was 
one of those narrow-minded artists who identify them- 
selves completely with a certain phase of art, and who, 
perhaps, by that concentration of their faculties, ex- 
press themselves in it as naturally as in their native 
lansuacfe. Soufflot committed terrible havoc in Notre 
Dame, and proved to all future ages that he had neither 
knowledge nor feeling about Gothic; but when, in 1764, 
he began the church of St. Genevieve, he had found 
congenial occupation. The foundation-stone was laid 
by Louis XV. with a votive intention ; but the building 
was completed in the beginning of the Revolution, and 
the Constituent Assembly opened it as' a " Pantheon," 
or temple dedicated to all gods, including by extension 
all heroes or great men. The well-known inscription 
then placed in large letters upon the frieze over the 
portico, " AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAIS- 
SANTE," is a clear explanation of the sense attached to 
the Greek name of the building; and a very fine in- 
scription it is, saying all that is needed in six perfectly 
cadenced words, full of noble purpose and patriotic 
feeling. Louis XVIIL handed over the edifice to the 
clergy in fulfilment of the original intention of Louis 
XV., and it remained in their hands, with the inscrip- 
tion effaced, until the revolution of July. Under Louis- 
Philippe and the Second Republic it was a Pantheon 
again, with the inscription restored ; but on the establish- 
ment of Louis Napoleon's personal power, when he was 



142 



Paris. 



buying the support of the clergy, the Pantheon was 
given to them a second time, and they were allowed 
to keep it until the funeral of Victor Hugo. They re- 
estabhshed altars in the interior, and a cross upon the 




THE PANTHEON. 



dome, but they did not efface the inscription. In the 
early revolutionary stage of the Third Republic, there 
being some apprehension that the Pantheon might be 
secularized again, a plan was matured for its decoration 



The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 143 

with religious paintings as a sort of final prise de pos- 
session in favor of the Church; but this has availed 
nothing, and now (1885) it seems possible that the 
paintings may be removed. This could be done, I 
believe, without destroying them.i 

Much opprobrium has been cast upon the Republi- 
can Government for its conduct in this matter, but it 
may be remembered that a monarch, Louis-Philippe, 
did exactly the same thing; and if consecration is of 
eternal effect, then the English noblemen who have 
turned old abbeys into luxurious country-houses must 
be equally culpable. The Pantheon has never been a 
parish church, and. the persons whose desires or in- 
terests have been most interfered with are a dead king 
and a saint who died in the early twilight of French 
history. 

The Pantheon has stood the test of a hundred years 
of criticism, without which no building can be con- 
sidered sure of permanent fame. Its merits are not 
of a kind to excite enthusiasm, but they gain upon us 
with time, and satisfy the reason if they do not awaken 
the imagination. We can never feel with regard to a 
severe classical building like the Pantheon the glow of 
romantic pleasure which fills sense and spirit in Notre 
Dame or the Sainte Chapelle. If there is emotion here 
it is of a different kind. The building has a stately and 
severe dignity; it is at once grave and elegant, but it 
is neither amusing as Gothic architecture often is by its 

1 As the removal of the paintings is uncertain, the account of some of 
them which appeared in tlie first edition of this book is retained. 



1 44 Paris. 

variety, nor astonishing as Gothic buildings are by the 
boldness with which they seem to contravene the ordi- 
nary conditions of matter. The edifice consists of a 
very plain building in the form of a cross, with a pedi- 
ment on pillars at one end and a dome rising in the 
middle. There are no visible windows, a renunciation 
that adds immensely to the severity and gravity of the 
composition, while it enhances the value of the columns 
and pediment, and gives (by contrast) great additional 
lightness and beauty to the admirable colonnade be- 
neath the dome. There does not exist, in modern 
architecture, a more striking example of the value of 
a blank wall. The vast plain spaces are overwhelming 
when seen near, and positively required the little deco- 
ration which, in the shape of festooned garlands, relieves 
their upper portion. At a little distance the building is 
seen to be, for the dome, what a pedestal is for a statue ; 
and the projection of the transepts on each side of the 
portico, when the edifice is seen in front, acts as margin 
to an engraving. Had their plain surfaces been en- 
riched and varied with windows, the front view would 
have lost half its meaning; the richness of the Corin- 
thian capitals and sculptured tympanum, and the im- 
portance of the simple inscription, draw the eye to 
themselves at once. 

The situation of the Pantheon is the finest in Paris 
for an edifice of that kind. Only one other is compar- 
able to it, Montmartre, on which is now slowly rising a 
church of another order, dedicated to the Sacri Coeur. 
The dome of the Pantheon is one of the great land- 



The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 145 

marks of Paris ; it is visible from every height and from 
a thousand places of no particular elevation. It does 
not simply belong to its own quarter, but to the whole 
city. 

The interior is interesting in different ways, both as 
an experiment in architecture and as an experiment in 
the employment of mural painting on an important 
scale. The first point likely to interest an architectural 
student is the manner in which the architect has com- 
bined his vaults and his pillars. Soufiflot's tendency 
(unlike that of the architects of St. Peter's in Rome and 
St. Paul's in London) was towards an excessive light- 
ness. His project was to erect his dome on elegant 
pillars ; but these were found insufficient, and another 
architect (Rondelet) replaced them by massive piers 
of masonr}\ Elsewhere there are Corinthian columns 
carrying a frieze and cornice, and above the cornice a 
groined (intersected) vault, of course with round arches, 
and having exceedingly slender terminations, as this 
system of vaulting cuts away nearly everything and 
leaves a minimum of substance at the corners to bear 
the weight. You may see such vaults frequently in the 
works of the early Italian painters, but they always sup- 
port them by very slender and elegant columns ; where- 
as in Soufflot's work they rest on a Corinthian order, 
with its entablature, which gives the idea of a contra- 
diction, for either the vaulting is too light or the en- 
tablature is needlessly heavy. The Italian painters 
were consistent on the side of lightness. Wren on the 
side of heaviness ; but it seems as if Soufflot had rather 

10 



146 



Paris. 



confounded the two, so far as the satisfaction of the eye 
is concerned. 

There is a remarkable peculiarity about the level 
of the floor ; the aisles and transepts are higher than 




THE PANTHEON FROM THE GARDENS OF THE LUXEMBOURG. 



the nave, into which you have to descend by five 
steps. The general aspect of the interior is agreeable, 
from the pleasant natural color of the stone and its 
thoroughly careful finish everywhere; but the large 



The Pantheon^ Invalicks^ and Madeleine. 147 

spaces of wall, though divided by half-columns, were 
felt to be too bare, and there have been various 
projects for their decoration. That which is now 
being carried into execution includes the painting 
of many mural pictures at a height which we should 
describe as the line in an exhibition, and also of 
decorative friezes at a greater height above the eye. 
I have mentioned the columns which, half buried in 
the wall, divide what, without them, would be its too 
extensive spaces. The existence of these columns 
cuts the wall into a series of upright panels not always 
convenient for the purposes of an artist, so it has been 
decided that the larger compositions should include 
three of these spaces, and that the picture should in 
these cases appear as if it were seen behind the col- 
umns, which themselves are left without any kind of 
painting or decoration. The plan was the best that 
could have been adopted under the circumstances, as 
the artists would have felt cramped by being confined 
to narrow upright panels ; but it required very careful 
management to preserve Soufiflot's architectural effect. 

Mural painting ought never to make us feel as if the 
wall were taken away, because that is an injury to the 
architecture. The painting should be so far removed 
from realism that we feel the wall to be a wall still, 
upon which certain events have been commemorated. 
Among French mural painters, not one has under- 
stood this so well as Puvis de Chavannes, and it would 
have been wise to entrust to him the entire decoration 
of the Pantheon, both for the sake of the architecture 



14B Paris. 

and for the unity of the work; but, unfortunately (so 
far as these considerations are concerned), other men 
have also been called in, men of great ability, no doubt, 
yet who were not disposed to make the necessary 
sacrifices. Puvis de Chavannes is essentially a mural 
painter. He has accepted the conventionalisms of that 
kind of art, and his mind is so exceptionally consti- 
tuted that such restraints are evidently agreeable to him 
and favorable to his inventive powers. His large work in 
the Pantheon represents the finding of Saint Genevieve 
when a child by Saint Germain and Saint Loup, at 
Nanterre, when they were journeying towards England. 
The bishop sees that the child has a religious aspect, 
" has the Divine seal upon her," and predicts for her 
a memorable future. This takes place in a vast land- 
scape, with undulating ground and fine trees in the 
middle distance against a line of blue hills, and a blue 
sky with white, long clouds. In the foreground is a 
rustic scene, including the milking of a cow under 
a shed ; and in the middle distance we have a view 
of Nanterre, or at least of a mediaeval city. The 
figures are all very simply painted in dead color, kept 
generally pale and hardly going beyond tints, which 
are often false so far as nature is concerned, but never 
discordant. Such painting is very reticent, very con- 
sistent; and, though it is not true, it contains a great 
amount of truth, and implies far more knowledge than 
it directly expresses. The landscape background, for 
example, is simple, but it is not ignorant; it shows 
quite plainly that the painter is a man of our own 



The Pantheon^ Invalides^ and Madeleine. 149 

century, perfectly conversant with our knowledge, yet 
decided not to go beyond a certain fixed point in the 
direction of actual imitation. The figures are exceed- 
ingly dignified ; but when the painter gets away from 
the muscular type, and has to deal with weaker men or 
with children, he is not so satisfying. A smaller pic- 
ture represents the child Saint Genevieve praying in 
a field, while the rustics watch and admire her. The 
sentiment here is very pure and simple, like that of 
an idyllic poem. In the upper part of the composition 
a ploughboy, behind trees, watches the saint while 
his oxen rest; in the lower part, a peasant man and 
a woman watch her also. 

Now, although these paintings tell their story per- 
fectly, not a single person or other object in them is 
so far realized as to make us forget the wall-surface. 
A story has been told upon the wall just as an inscrip- 
tion might have been written upon it, but nothing has 
been done to take the wall away. Even the pale tint- 
ing is so contrived as not to contrast too violently with 
the natural stone around it. Let the visitor who has 
just seen these paintings, and, perhaps, been a little put 
out by their conventionalism, glance up from them to 
the pendentives under the dome painted by Carvallo 
from drawings by Gerard. Those works are strong 
in darks, and in far more powerful relief than the situa- 
tion warrants. They are also surrounded by heavily 
gilt carvings, which make the surrounding stone look 
poor; in short, from the architectural point of view, 
they are a series of vulgar blunders. I would not use 



150 Paris. 

language of this kind with reference to so serious, so 
noble an artist as Jean Paul Laurens, but I cannot help 
regretting that his magnificent composition of the death 
of Saint Genevieve was not in some public gallery rather 
than in the Pantheon. The realization is far too power- 
ful for mural painting. We do not see a record on 
a wall, but the wall is demolished, and through the 
opening we witness the scene itself, the infinitely- 
pathetic closing scene at the end of a saintly life, when, 
even in the last moments of extremest weakness, a 
venerable woman still throws into the expression of 
her countenance the benedictions that she cannot utter. 
One consequence of the external force with which all 
the figures and objects are realized in full modelling 
and color is that the two columns which cross the work 
vertically are felt to be in the way; in other words, 
the architecture of the Pantheon is in the way, and 
so far from helping the architect, the painter has done 
him an injury, for what are smoothly chiselled stones, 
what are fluted columns and pretty Corinthian capitals, 
to the awful approach of Death? 

On the other mural paintings in the Pantheon we 
have no need to dwell. So far as I know them yet ^ 
they belong to the class of historical genre common 
in the French salons, and have neither the power 
of Laurens nor the careful adaptation of Puvis de 
Chavannes, Cabanel's pictures represent three scenes 
in the history of Saint Louis, — one his childhood, when 

^ Some paintings on the south side have been uncovered lately, and 
these I have not seen. 



The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 1 5 1 

he is being taught by his mother; a second, his civil 
justice ; and a third, his military life as a Crusader. 
The first subject is the best suited to Cabanel's talent, 
and is a pretty domestic scene. The subject selected 
by M. Maillot for his paintings in the south transept 
is a mediaeval procession with the relics of Saint 
Genevieve, and these paintings are a good example 
of a danger different from the powerful realization of 
Laurens. In the present instance the evil is a crudity 
of brilliant color, like mediaeval illumination, which 
always seems out of place on a wall unless it is carried 
out consistently by polychromatic decoration through- 
out the building. 

It is sometimes said by journalists that these paintings 
are frescos (wall-paintings are generally taken for fres- 
cos). The fact is that they are oil-paintings on toile 
maroujic'e, that is, on canvas fastened to the wall by 
a thick coat of white-lead. This is now the accepted 
method for mural painting in France. It is convenient 
for the artist, as it allows him to paint in his own studio 
in a material he is accustomed to use; and it is believed 
to be as permanent as any other. 

The dome of the Pantheon attracts the eye simply 
by its own architectural beauty; but that of the Inva- 
lides, by Mansard, is lustrous with abundant gilding, 
and on a sunny day shines over Paris with the most 
brilliant effect. It is splendid against one of those 
cerulean skies that are still possible in the capital of 
France. Certainly nothing does so much for the splen- 
dor of a great city as very conspicuous gilding. There 



152 



Paris. 



are drives in Paris, as, for instance, from the Trocadero 
to the Place de la Concorde, during which the dome 
of the Invalides accompanies you like a harvest-moon. 
On a-nearer approach it is the architecture that claims 
attention. The dome itself is fine, but in many re- 




^^. 



•i aUc 






ySaX 



THE INVALIDES. 



spects the building as a whole is greatly inferior to the 
Pantheon. Soufiflot made the body of his church an 
ample base for his dome in every direction ; but at the 
Invalides one receives the impression of a man with 
a prodigious head on a small body and very narrow 
shoulders. The columns of the dome are in couples, 



The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 15 3 

with projecting masses doing the work of buttresses. 
This gives more hght and shade than the simple colon- 
nade of the Pantheon, but not such beautiful per- 
spective, as the projections interfere with it. The 
composition of the front makes us feel strongly the 
special merits of the Pantheon, Instead of the majestic 
columns of Soufflot's work, his rich pediment, and the 
massive plain walls on each side as margin, we have in 
the Invalides a poor little pediment reduced to still more 
complete insignificance by the obtrusive windows, etc., 
on each side of it. Again, the front of the Invalides 
offers an example of that vice in Renaissance architec- 
ture which Soufflot avoided, — the superposition of dif- 
ferent orders. It is divided into two stories, Roman 
Doric below and Corinthian above, a variety that the 
Renaissance architects enjoyed, though it does not seem 
more desirable than two languages in one poem. 

This criticism does not affect either the beauty of 
Mansard's dome as a fine object seen from a distance, 
or the importance of the interior, one of the most 
impressive in all Paris, especially since it has become the 
mausoleum of Napoleon I. 

A lofty dome, supported by massive piers perforated 
with narrow arched passages and faced with Corinthian 
columns and pilasters, a marble floor of extraordinary 
richness and beauty everywhere, all round the base of 
the dome a stair of six marble steps descending to the 
circular space under it, and in the midst of this space 
a great opening or well, with a diameter of more than 
seventy feet, and a marble parapet, breast-high, for the 



154 Paris, 

safety of the visitors who look down into it, — such is 
the first impression of the interior. 

Not only do the people invariably look down, but 
they generally gaze for a long time, as if they expected 
something to occur; yet a more unchanging spectacle 
could not be imagined. In the middle there is a great 
sarcophagus of polished red Russian granite, and twelve 
colossal statues stand under the parapet, all turning 
their grave, impassible faces towards the centre. They 
are twelve Victories whose names have resounded 
through the world, and in the spaces between them 
are sheaves of standards taken in battle, and in the red 
sarcophagus lies the body of Napoleon. 

The idea of this arrangement is due to the architect 
Visconti, who had to solve the problem how to arrange 
a tomb of such overwhelming importance without hiding 
the architecture of so noble an interior as this. His 
solution was admirably successful. The arrangement 
does not interfere in the slightest degree with the archi- 
tecture of the edifice, which would have been half hid- 
den by a colossal tomb on its own floor; while we have 
only to look over the parapet to be impressed with the 
grandeur and the poetic suitableness of the plan. With 
our customs of burial we are all in the habit of looking 
down into a grave before it is filled up, and the impres- 
siveness of Napoleon's tomb is greatly enhanced by our 
downward gaze. We feel that, notwithstanding all this 
magnificence, we are still looking down into a grave, — 
a large grave with a sarcophagus in it instead of a coffin, 
but a grave nevertheless. The serious grandeur, the 



The Pantheon^ Invalides^ and Madeleine. 155 

stately order, of this arrangement seems to close appro- 
priately the most extraordinary career in history; and 
yet it is impossible to look upon that sarcophagus with- 
out the most discouraging reflections. The most splen- 




THE MADELEINE. 

did tomb in Europe is the tomb of the most selfish, the 
most culpably ambitious, the most cynically unscrupu- 
lous of men ; and the sorrowful reflection is that if he 
had been honorable, unselfish, unwilling to injure others, 
he would have died in comparative or in total obscurity, 



156 Paris. 

and these prodigious posthumous honors would never 
have been bestowed upon his memory.^ 

The churcli of the Magdalen (Madeleine) is curiously 
connected with the history of Napoleon I., who had the 
incompleted edifice continued with the strange intention 
of dedicating it as a temple to the memory of La Grande 
Armee. Every year, on the anniversaries of the battles 
of Austerlitz and Jena, the temple was to have been 
illuminated and a discourse delivered concerning the 
military virtues, with an eulogy of those who perished 
in the two battles. This intention was never carried 
out, and the building, which had been begun in 1764 
as a church, was finished as a church under the reign 
of Louis-Philippe. Nothing could apparently be more 
decided in architectural intentions than the Madeleine 
as we see it now. It seems to be plainly a temple, and 
never to have been intended for anything else. In 
reality, however, it was begun under Louis XV. as a 
church, resembling what is now the Pantheon, and the 
change of plan was carried into effect many years after 
the works had been actually commenced. It is not by 
any means a subject of regret that this temple should 
have been erected in Paris, as it gives many students of 
architecture who have not visited the south of Europe 
an excellent opportunity for feeling what an antique 
temple was like, to a degree that is not possible with no 

1 Some fresh example o£ his baseness is constantly cropping up. 
During the last visit I paid to the Invalides, in May this year (18S3}, I 
could not help thinking all the time about that letter to which Napoleon 
forged the signature of Davoust, and for publication too, as narrated not 
very long since in the " Revue des Deux Mondes." 



The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 1 5 7 

more powerful teachers than photographs or small 
models. Viollet-le-Duc said that it was barbarous to 
build the copy of a Greek temple in Paris or London, 
or among the mists of Edinburgh, condemning alike 
the Madeleine and the fragmentary Scottish copy of 
the Parthenon; but surely a student of architecture, 
born in the north, would visit both the Scottish Parthe- 
non and the Parisian temple with great interest, simply 
because they show him columns on their own scale, 
real columns in the open air. We are so accustomed 
to Gothic and Renaissance churches that a temple is 
an acceptable variety, were it only to demonstrate, by 
actual comparison, the immense superiority of more 
modern forms for purposes of Christian worship. We 
ought to bear in mind, however, that although the 
Madeleine resembles a Corinthian temple externally, it 
has not the surroundings of such a temple and is not as- 
sociated with its uses. For Christian architecture, on the 
other hand, such a system of building involves a great 
waste of money and space in the colonnades and the 
passages between them and the walled building or cella. 
The space in the Madeleine, already so restricted, is 
limited still farther by internal projections intended to 
divide the length into compartments and to give a rea- 
son for six lateral chapels, so that every one who enters 
it for the first time is surprised by the smallness of the 
interior. I need hardly observe that there is not the 
slightest attempt to preserve the internal arrangements 
of a Greek temple, even if they were precisely known, 
on which architects are not agreed. The side chapels 



158 Paris, 

have arches over them, the roof is vaulted with round 
arches across the building, springing from Corinthian 
columns, and in each section is a dome-ceiling with a 
circular light (as in the Pantheon at Rome), these lights 
being the only windows in the edifice. The high altar 
is in a round apse en ad de four, with marble panels 
and a hemicycle of columns behind the altar. There is 
great profusion of marbles of various kinds, of gilding, 
and of mural painting, that I have not space to describe 
in detail. Enough has been said to show that the work, 
as a whole, is a combination of Greek, Roman, and 
French ideas. The general idea of the exterior is 
Greek, but if you examine details you see the influence 
of Rome, and you find it still more strongly marked 
inside, by the arches of the roof. The French spirit is 
shown in the decoration chiefly, which is so truly Pari- 
sian that the Madeleine is instinctively preferred by 
fashionable people. A fashionable marriage there is 
one of the most thoroughly consistent spectacles to be 
seen in modern Paris. Here is nothing to remind us 
of the austerity of past ages, but the gilded youth of 
to-day may walk along soft carpets, amid an odor of 
incense and flowers and the sounds of mellifluous music. 
The pretty ceremony over, they pass out down the car- 
peted steps, and an admiring crowd watches them into 
their carriages. And nobody thinks about the dead at 
Austerlitz and Jena ! 



IX. 

ST. EUSTACHE, ST. ETIENNE DU MONT, 
AND ST. SULPICE. 

"X TEXT to Notre Dame, St. Eustache is the largest 
-^ ^ church in Paris, and the difference between them 
is much more marked in length than in height and 
breadth. The length of Notre Dame is nearly 127 
metres, that of St. Eustache only 882 ; but while the 
breadth of Notre Dame is 48 metres, that of St. Eus- 
tache is nearly 43 ; and the difference of height between 
the two edifices, internally, is scarcely more than one 
English foot in favor of the Cathedral. Besides their 
similarity in height and width, the two churches have 
an important feature in common, — their double aisles. 
In short, it seems as if the builders of St, Eustache had 
in their minds some distinct idea of rivalry with Notre 
Dame, at least to a certain degree. 

Before the present church of St. Eustache, there 
existed a Gothic edifice that was not half so long, nor 
half so broad either, so that it would not occupy a quar- 
ter of the area ; and if its height was proportionately 
small (which is probable, as the present building is 
very lofty), the' cubic dimensions of the old church^ 

1 There had been another church still earlier, and perhaps a still 
more remotely ancestral edifice than that ; but of these we know 
nothing. 



i6o Paris. 

would be less than one eighth of those of its successor. 
It is evident, therefore, that so far as the importance of 
the edifice is concerned we have nothing to regret; and 
it is not probable that the Gothic church exceeded the 
present building either in elegance of design or perfec- 
tion of workmanship, while it may be accepted as cer- 
tain that it could not have been so interesting to the 
student of architecture because the St. Eustache that 
we know is a valuable experiment on a scale sufficiently 
imposing for it to be really decisive. 

The interest of St. Eustache consists in this, that the 
designer, whoever he may have been, attempted to 
combine the general impressiveness of a Gothic edifice 
with the spirit of the Renaissance in every detail. He 
must have admired Gothic architecture in a certain 
fashion, and he must have appreciated its influence on 
the mind, yet at the same time he did not admire it 
enough to follow it slavishly in anything. Nobody 
knows who the first architect was. It has been said 
that his name was David; and there was a Charles 
David buried in the church, whose epitaph says that 
he was architect and conductor of the building of that 
church ; but he must have been a successor to the first 
architect, as the first stone of the present building was 
laid by the Provost of Paris in the year i'532 (August 
19th), while Charles David was born in 1552. It is 
much to be regretted that the original .architect's name 
should have lapsed into complete oblivion, as he was 
an original thinker in architecture and a man of poetic 
imagination. 



S^. Eusiache^ St, Etie7ine^ and St, Sulpice. 1 6 1 

St. Eustache is closely connected, chronologically, 
with the Hotel de Ville, as that edifice was begun just 
•a year after the church. It has been supposed that the 
architect of St. Eustache must have been the architect 
of the Hotel de Ville, or else one of his pupils ; but this 
is a mere" supposition, without any evidence to support 
it. We may observe that although both edifices are 
works of remarkable merit, their merit is not the same. 
The Hotel de Ville is simply a Renaissance palace, very 
beautiful, but not attempting to solve any such problem 
as the reconciliation of two opposite styles ; while the 
Church of St. Eustache is from beginning to end a sus- 
tained and conscious effort to unite the imposing effect 
of Gothic with the delicacy and comparative sobriety 
of Renaissance architecture. The result is a hybrid in 
which every visitor who knows enough about architec- 
ture to be able to disentangle two opposite elements will 
find ample and pleasurable occupation. 

The ground-plan of St. Eustache approaches more 
nearly to that of Notre Dame than would be believed 
from the outward appearance of the two edifices. At 
St. Eustache the long hmb of the cross is much shorter 
in proportion; but you have the same four lines of 
columns, or piers, the same round apse and ponrtoitr, 
and the same series of small chapels outside the double 
aisles. In both edifices the transepts only reach to the 
external walls of the chapels. 

Other features that the two buildings have in com- 
mon are flying buttresses, rose-windows in the tran- 
septs, and spires at the intersection of the roof. That 



1 62 Paris. 

of Notre Dame has been restored, as we have seen, but 
the spire of St. Eustache was long since shortened to 
make a platform for a semaphore telegraph, and has 
never been re-established. 

The comparison fails most decidedly at the west end. 
Everybody knows that Notre Dame has twin towers 
and a great west front ; but, unfortunately, of the twin 
towers that St. Eustache was to have had only one has 
been built, and that is small and not noteworthy. Nor 
is it really one of the towers intended by the original 
architect. It is an invention of the eighteenth century, 
when it was thought necessary to erect a new portail, 
which included a complete new front. The unknown 
original architect had built a west front completely in 
harmony with the rest of the edifice ; but as for the 
towers, he had only carried one of them partly towards 
the height of the first detached story, while the other, 
though prepared for, was not carried high enough to 
detach it from the body of the church. Still, though 
incomplete, the original front was beautiful, being as 
elegant in its severer parts as the rest of the exterior; 
while, in obedience to Gothic precedent, it was en- 
riched with statues on the buttresses and in the door- 
ways, and with other decorative sculpture, which, if we 
may judge by what remains elsewhere, must have been 
of the most delicate and refined quality. That was 
in the time of the elegant Renaissance, when fancy and 
invention were not yet excluded from architecture. 
Then came the terrible mechanical period in the eight- 
eenth century, when both architects and the public per- 




CHURCH OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT. FROM SKETCH BY A. BRUNET DEBAINES. 



S^. E7tstache, St. Etiejtne^ and St, Sulpice. 163 

suaded themselves that graceful fancy was too light an 
element to be admitted in serious art; and it happened 
unfortunately that the west front of St. Eustache was 
rebuilt during this period, without the slightest con- 
sideration for the desire of the original architect that 
the church should be a combination of Gothic with 
Renaissance forms. 

The new portail was a very severe and very dull 
arrangement of Roman Doric on the ground story, with 
Roman Ionic and a plain pediment above. The one 
tower that was built is in a sort of Italian Corinthian. 
In order that the pediment might not appear too ab- 
surdly out of place, the lofty old gable which would 
have appeared above it was cut off like the side of a 
pyramid with an Italian balustrade at its base. The 
general result is a huge applique that no more belongs 
to St. Eustache than it would belong to the Sainte 
Chapelle. It is much to be regretted that a complete 
restoration of this part of the church was not under- 
taken during the reign of Napoleon III., when it might 
have been quietly carried into effect. At the same 
time towers might have been built in the spirit of the 
original work. It is now too late to dream of any such 
expenditure on the part of the Government; and the 
priests have enough on their hands with the huge mon- 
umental church of the Sacred Heart on Montmartre, 
which absorbs all the money that can be collected. 

It is interesting to observe in what way the classical 
tastes of a Renaissance architect modified Gothic forms. 
Greek architecture, though elegant, was stiff and angu- 



164 Paris. 

lar; Roman architecture, though less visibly angular 
because it had the round arch, was still simple and 
severe ; but Gothic architecture became pliant like the 
branches of trees and lively like tongues of flame. In 
St. Eustache the Gothic forms are stiffened by classical 
feeling. The tracery of the windows is simplified and 
monotonously repeated in corresponding parts of the 
church. This simplification is especially visible in the 
rose-windows, so poor and angular in comparison with 
true Gothic. Again, in the spaces over the doors, in- 
stead of the richly inventive sculpture of the Gothic 
tympanum, with its elaborate story of the Fall of Man 
or the Last Judgment, the Renaissance architect has 
introduced hexagonal tracery almost like the cells of a 
honeycomb. Even in the large pilasters with Corin- 
thian capitals the half-column becomes an elongated 
panel with a triangle at the top, and another triangle 
at the bottom, pointing towards each other. For the 
intricately curved iron-work on Gothic doors we have 
plain oblong panels giving sixteen right angles to each 
door. In a frieze running above the lowest windows 
triglyphs are introduced,, and all the rest of the orna- 
mentation is so angular that they do not seem out of 
place. With its exceedingly perfect finish, and its 
abundance of plain little details, the outside of St. Eus- 
tache reminds one of nothing so much as a masterpiece 
of serious cabinet-making. And the wonder is, that 
although the style is a jumble of reminiscences from 
Greece, Italy, and mediaeval France, not one of them 
in a condition approaching to purity, the whole is per- 




INTERIOR OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT. 



St Eustache^ St. Etienne^ and St Sulpice. 165 

fectly harmonious. The reason is that every borrowed 
idea has been so modified as to combine with every 
other. 

The interior has one transcendent merit, and several 
obvious defects. The merit is an overpowering sub- 
hmity due to the expression of height which again is in 
great part the result of the narroAv space between the 
columns, or piers, and the elevation of the point at 
which the arches spring. It is like being at the bottom 
of a deep and narrow ravine and seeing it spanned by 
a little stone bridge far up above our heads. The im- 
pression of loftiness is also greatly aided by the unusual 
height of the aisles. 

Unfortunately, the narrowness of the space between 
the piers, and the comparative massiveness of the piers 
themselves, have the bad effect, sometimes met with in 
Gothic churches, of impeding the view diagonally. So 
long as you are in the large open space of the nave it is 
well, because that space is open enough to prevent any 
sense of confinement; but though the aisles are very 
lofty they convey the feeling of narrow passages, be- 
cause the successive piers of masonry are joined to- 
gether in perspective exactly as if they were walls, and 
j^ou only get a glimpse through the opening which is 
nearest you. Some readers may remember the remark- 
able difference in this respect between the Cathedral at 
Rouen and the well-known Church of St. Ouen in the 
same city. The Church of St. Ouen is much more open, 
which gives more spacious perspectives, and may be 
one of the reasons why it is so generally preferred to the 



1 66 Paris. 

Cathedral, in spite of some architectural authority on 
the other side. 

There is one notable advantage in the mixed style 
of St. Eustache. It is near enough to classic architec- 
ture to admit without incongruity both learned figure- 
sculpture and learned modern painting, so that there is 
no necessity for archaic forms in either. It is probably 
for this reason that St. Eustache seems more happily 
and suitably decorated than most other churches. 

On the whole, we must come to the conclusion that 
the interesting experiment of combining Gothic effects 
with classical details and finish could not have been 
made more intelligently than here. It is not at all an 
unreasoned decadence of Gothic ; it is a combination at 
once logical and imaginative. The unknown architect 
was an artist, and a great artist; he could rise to the 
sublime, and enjoy the exercise of a delicate and dis- 
criminating taste. Yet in spite of his rare powers, of 
combination he founded nothing. The style of St. Eus- 
tache might have become the modern style, but it did 
not. In the eighteenth century men fell into that heavy 
style of pseudo-classical architecture founded on de- 
based Italian precedent, which mistook dulness for dig- 
nity, and of which we have a striking example in the 
west front of St. Eustache itself. In the nineteenth, 
ecclesiastical architecture in Paris has gone in two direc- 
tions, — either towards a revival of past styles, as in the 
meagre Gothic Church of St. Clotilde, the Gothic Church 
of St. Bernard (Rue d'Alger) and others, the Roman- 
esque St. Ambroise (Boulevard Voltaire), and St. Pierre 



S^. Eustachey St. Etienne^ and St. Sulpice. 167 

de Montrouge ; or else towards the invention of a thor- 
oughly modern style, as in St. Augustin, the Trinity, 
and St. Francois Xavier. It is useless to indulge in 
unavailing regret, and it may have been necessary to 
the full understanding of Gothic by the architects of 
our time that many of them should pass through that 
wretched state of probation known by its fruits in miser- 
able pseudo-Gothic ; yet it seems as if, in St. Eustache, 
they had a compromise between modern finish and 
Gothic invention which might have suited modern capa- 
bilities, and at the same time have harmonized with the 
development of other arts. 

The Church of St. Etienne du Mont (near the Pan- 
theon) is not, like St. Eustache, an example of the com- 
plete fusion of the Gothic and Renaissance ideas ; it is 
an example of Gothic in its decadence, strongly influ- 
enced by Renaissance, and finally lost in the new style 
from which every trace of Gothic is eliminated. There 
is, consequently, in St. Etienne nothing of that strong 
and peculiar artistic interest that belongs to the remark- 
able edifice we have just been describing. St. Eustache 
stands alone, but there are many churches in which a 
debased Gothic is clung to with hesitation, and at length 
abandoned, in some important part, for the style that 
had come into fashion. Still, very few of these churches 
can be compared to St. Etienne for a certain romantic, 
charm. Only the most severe and intolerant purists in 
Gothic would quarrel with a decadence like this, in 
which, if a great art is dying, it dies like the last 
cadences of music, leaving only a regret for the end of 



1 68 Paris. 

inspiring or sweet emotions. You may build a church 
entirely according to rule, you may copy in all its de- 
tails the best art of the best time, yet not succeed in 
awakening any feeling beyond a cold approval of your 
accuracy. In St. Etienne there are many deviations 
from precedent, many things that are theoretically diffi- 
cult to defend; but the building is a poem, the archi- 
tect was an artist who had feeling and imagination, and 
this small interior impresses the mind more powerfully 
than many that are far vaster and incomparably more 
costly. 

We have seen that in St. Eustache the view is diago- 
nally blocked by the nearness and thickness of the piers. 
In St. Etienne this fault is happily avoided. The archi- 
tecture is everywhere open and penetrable, and the 
intersections are delightful, especially because you are 
always sure to have painted windows in the background. 
The clerestory is proportionately low, being only the 
height of the arch in the groined vault itself; and con- 
sequently the pillars would have appeared too high had 
they not been united, at nearly half their height, by a 
gallery on arches, which is one of the original features 
of the church. This gallery, which (though otherwise 
placed) answers to the triforium in pure Gothic edi- 
fices, is exceedingly light, with open balustrades, and it 
has afforded an excuse for the elegant staircases that 
wind round the columns on each side the beautiful 
rood-screen, and belong to it, not only by their design, 
but also as parts of the same beautiful and elaborate 
composition. 



/i^\ 



rPJill 



if nr^l 




¥11 /..\\ 



..MM 



WEST FRONT OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT. 



S/. Eusiache, St. Etiemie, and St. Sulpice, 1 69 

The great charm of St. Etienne is the beauty and 
variety of the accidental views in it. There is in every 
church the great view down the nave, and if that is not 
successful we say the building is a failure ; but besides 
this supremely important aspect of the building, there 
is, or there is not, the quality of revealing unexpected 
beauties. Some churches are very remarkable for the 
possession of this quality, — they even possess it to a 
degree that the architect himself may possibly not have 
foreseen ; others are absolutely destitute of it. There 
is no trace of it in the Madeleine. When you have 
been in the Madeleine a quarter of an hour you have 
nothing more to discover as to the possibilities of its 
architecture, and for any new interest you must turn to 
the decorative details added by the sculptor and the 
painter. On the other hand, there are many little-known 
churches — such as that at Dreux, for example — of 
which the charm consists in lovely combinations, that 
seem entirely accidental, and which a painter would 
immediately select in preference to the long, formal view 
down the nave. The best places for finding these are 
near the intersections of the nave and transepts, and in 
\he. pourtotir round the apse, when happily there is one. 
In St. Etienne du Mont all the necessary conditions for 
producing happy accidental combinations exist in the 
utmost perfection. The view is never blocked up, and 
there is always a rich mystery of painted glass at the 
end of it, relieving the cool color of the stone. The 
prettiest of these minor views are those from the aisles 
looking across the transepts and towards the apse, 



170 Paris. 

because there you get the extremely elegant work of 
the rood-screen, which is continued across the aisles, 
leaving a passage through beautiful doorways under the 
prettiest little pediments imaginable, surrounded with 
fanciful and delicate sculpture in the charming taste of 
the refined Renaissance. 

The west front of St. Etienne is very well known from 
photographs. It is a curious composition, not defensi- 
ble, logically, yet picturesque and elegant in the total 
result. First you have a pediment supported on four 
imbedded columns of a debased Corinthian, with an arch 
above the tympanum over a square-headed door. Above 
the apex of the pediment oddly comes a rose-window, 
much nearer to pure Gothic than those in St. Eustache, 
and over the rose-window 2l fronton in the segment of a 
circle like those which alternate with pediments on the 
river-front of the Louvre. To crown all, we have a 
highly pitched gable, essentially Gothic in principle, but 
with Renaissance ornament. The tower is narrow and 
elegant, and the composition of the front is happily 
aided by a little turret with pepper-box roof low down 
to the left. To a taste educated in the severe tradition 
either of Greek or of pure Gothic such a combination 
as this must seem indefensible, yet it is at the same time 
elegant and picturesque. It may be proved, by reason- 
ing, to be incongruous ; and yet there is so much good 
management in the proportioning of the parts and the 
finish of the details that it is impossible to turn away 
from such a work without a tormenting desire to look 
at it again. 




THE CHURCH OF ST. SULPICE. 



S^. Eustache^ St. Etienne^ and St. Sulpice. 171 

The Church of St. Sulpice is very imposing from its 
dimensions and the sober massiveness of its construc- 
tion, but it has none of the charm which belongs to the 
two edifices we have just been studying. The front is 
composed of two stories that include the lower parts of 
the towers, and between the towers an open portico with 
a loggia above. The architect employed two orders in 
the front, — Italian Doric in the lower story and Italian 
Ionic in the loggia. Corinthian is freely employed in 
the northern tower, and a sort of Corinthian also in the 
other, which has never been externally finished, though 
it has attained its full height. A common criticism of 
this front is that it does not answer in any special rrian- 
ner to the interior of the church, of which it explains 
nothing. It is, in fact, only a gigantic screen giving the 
church a sort of adventitious importance. Architecture 
of this kind may excite admiration by majesty and 
grandeur, but, unlike the work of the elegant Renais- 
sance, it can never charm or delight. It is the archi- 
tecture of pride and power; it is not the architecture of 
inventive affection. 

The rest of St. Sulpice externally is heavy, substantial, 
and dull. It is, I believe, a most respectable piece of 
building and likely to be very durable, but it seems des- 
titute of fancy and imagination. The interior has round 
arches springing from massive piers against each of 
which is a Corinthian pilaster, and the roof is simply 
vaulted with a large arch springing from the walls pierced 
with lower vaults for the clerestory windoAvs. The effect 
is serious without any of the lightness and grace that 



172 Paris. 

characterize the Pantheon. Much of the effect of St. 
Sulpice is due to its great size. The measures given by 
different authorities are not precisely ahke; but it ap- 
pears from them that the Church of St. Sulpice is longer 
and broader than Notre Dame, and very nearly as lofty 
in the interior. The towers of St. Sulpice are higher by 
two metres than those of the metropolitan Cathedral, 
which they resemble in this, that they were to have had 
spires, or some kind of superstructure that was never 
added for fear of insecurity. 

The greatest artistic attraction in St. Sulpice is the 
chapel of the Holy Angels, with three large mural 
paintings by Eugene Delacroix. He painted these on 
the wall itself, which he primed in white lead with his 
own hand. They were finished in June, 1861, and Dela- 
croix admitted people to see the chapel by circular 
before it was open to the general public. He was anx- 
ious about the effect on the art worjd, and rather disap- 
pointed, as M. Charles Blanc and others were decidedly 
cool, and the press was much divided in opinion. Since 
then Delacroix is better understood, and we are not 
so much disconcerted by his violent action and strong 
coloring. The subjects on the walls are Heliodorus 
beaten and Jacob wrestling, while that on the ceiling is 
a Saint Michael triumphing over Lucifer. I have not 
space for any adequate criticism of these works, but 
may say that the subjects suited the artist's genius 
exactly, 'and that he did himself justice. Whether art 
of that character, which is entirely wanting in repose, is 
suitable to mural painting, is another question. I think 



S^. Eustache^ St. Etienne, and St. Sttlpice. 173 

it is not. I believe that if the calm stability of architec- 
ture is to be happily accompanied by painting, the pic- 
torial accompaniment should neither be too active nor 
too loud. It ought to be serene, calm, majestic, and 
severely conventional. In a movable picture the artist 
may display as much fire and impetuosity as he pleases ; 
if the owner afterwards hangs the work in a wrong place 
it is not the artist's mistake, and it is easily remedied : 
but mural painting becomes a fixed part of the edifice, 
and the feverish energy of Delacroix seems out of har- 
mony with the stately and massive architecture of St. 
Sulpice. 



X. 

PARKS AND GARDENS. 

'' I ^HE parks of London are so magnificent, so far 
superior to those of any other capital, that we 
EngHshmen are naturally exposed to the mistake of 
measuring all other town parks by that standard, and 
then despising them accordingly. I say " mistake," 
because it is clearly an error to compare anything 
with a quite exceptional example of its kind. A man 
may be an admirable swimmer without being in any 
way comparable to the wonderful man who threw 
away his life at Niagara; a church may be a noble 
and interesting building without being half so large 
as the enormous cathedral at Rome ; and a town park 
may be infinitely precious to the inhabitants of a great 
city, though it would look small on the banks of the 
Serpentine. A Londoner can never judge of town 
parks with any fairness if he is constantly thinking 
of his own. The right way to estimate such posses- 
sions is not the comparative, when comparison can 
lead to no result. If you wish to buy a book it is 
well for you to be told that there is a better and 
bigger work on the same subject, as perhaps you can 
afford to get it; but the Parisians cannot have Hyde 



Parks and Gardens. 175 

Park. They have their own places of recreation, and, 
especially during the last thirty years, there has been 
a laudable desire to multiply such places, and make 
them both prettier and more convenient ; but there is 
no attempt to rival the parks of London. 

Even if Parisian town-councillors had been disposed 
to make the necessary sacrifices, such parks would 
have been impossible in a city enclosed by fortifica- 
tions. Let us remember what the history of Paris 
has always been. The town has always been a for- 
tress ; ring after ring of military wall has defended and 
limited it, nor was an old ring ever demolished until 
it had been made needless by the larger one outside 
of it. In the cramped interior of a mediaeval city 
the nearest approach to a park was simply a private 
garden, unless when land was enclosed, as it was within 
the wall of Philip Augustus, as a provision of building- 
land for future necessities. Such land was usually 
cultivated for profit until the time came for covering 
it with crowded houses and narrow streets. Unfortu- 
nately, too, it invariably happens that the value of open 
spaces is never strongly felt until the city has grown to 
a great size and has generally covered the land which 
would have been most convenient for a park. The 
existence of some of the most important open spaces 
in such cities is due to the merest chance. Some king 
or queen has had a fancy for a palace or a garden just 
outside the wall. A considerable space of land has 
been enclosed for that purpose, and so protected from 
miscellaneous buildings. Afterwards the old wall has 



176 Paris. 

been removed and a new one built at a distance, and 
then the land happened accidentally to find itself within 
the city. In future ages royalty prefers some other 
garden, or else royalty is abolished, and then the open 
space is preserved as a popular recreation-ground. 
That is one way in which a town park may come 
into existence; another way is very different from 
that. A space of ground may be out of the way for 
a long time, and so irregular as to be inconvenient 
to build upon. Afterwards, as the town spreads, this 
piece of awkward ground is surrounded by houses 
and becomes valuable. Then the question arises how 
to make it most useful, and the town or the Govern- 
ment turns it into a sort of park or garden. In all this 
there is very little real planning of open spaces for the 
best advantage of the public. 

There was a time when the garden of the Tuileries lay 
just outside the wall of Paris, the enceinte of Charles V. ; 
and now it happens exactly in the same way that the 
Bois de Boulogne lies just outside the present wall, and 
if a new belt of fortifications is made at some future 
time, the Bois de Boulogne will be within the city. So 
the space of land occupied by the park of the Buttes 
Chaumont lay outside of the fiscal wall erected under 
Louis XVI., but it was afterwards included within the 
fortifications of Thiers. 

A short general account of the open spaces of Paris 
might be written as follows : The spaces of chief im- 
portance within the present walls are the gardens of 
the Tuileries and Luxembourg, the Champs Elysees, 



Parks and Gardens. 177 

the Champ de Mars, with the garden of the Trocadero 
opposite to it aciKDSs the Pont d'Jena, the Jardin des 
Plantes, the Pare Monceau, and that of the Buttes 
Chaumont. It wotdd seem out of place to mention 
the cemeteries here, but Parisian cemeteries are really 
little else than very large, well-kept gardens dedicated 
to the dead ; and they are constantly visited by rela- 
tives and friends, so that, in fact, such great cemeteries 
as those of Mont Parnasse, Montmartre, and especially 
Pere-la-Chaise, are places at least of retreat from the 
noise of the city, though the pleasure to be found in 
them belongs to the pleasures of melancholy. Just 
outside the present walls we have the Bois de Boulogne 
to the west and that of Vincennes to the east. Within 
the town there are now a considerable number of small 
gardens, with seats and fountains, besides trees, flowers, 
and a little space of lawn. These little gardens are 
always called " squares " by the Parisians ; they have 
become immensely popular, and are most precious to 
the inhabitants of crowded streets at a distance from 
the Tuileries or the Luxembourg. 

The origin of the Garden of the Tuileries is as 
follows: In the fourteenth century it was a region 
of market-gardens, brick-kilns, tile-kilns (whence the 
name), lime and plaster kilns, and potteries, inter- 
spersed with small summer residences for the citizens, 
at that time without the walls. It was in the highest 
degree improbable that such a region would be cov- 
ered by anything better than a labyrinth of narrow 
streets; but it so happened that a large portion of the 



178 Paris. 

land fell into the hands of one family, called Le Gendre, 
about the beginning of the sixteenth century, which 
rendered it possible to make, from them, an impor- 
tant purchase at once. The Duchess of Angouleme, 
mother of Francis I,, lived in a palace then existing, 
called le palais des Tournelles, and there was some 
horribly bad drainage near that dwelling, so that the 
most evil exhalations from a great mismanaged sewer 
offended the royal nostrils, and she looked out for a 
healthier and less odoriferous dweUing-place. There 
was a villa in the region of the Tuileries which sufficed 
for her purpose, and her son procured it for her, with 
a considerable estate of ground which belonged to 
the family of Le Gendre. At that time there was 
not the slightest intention of erecting a palace there ; 
the Duchess simply wanted a summer residence for 
health's sake, and afterwards she lent it for life to Jean 
Tiercelin on his marriage. He was inaitre d'hotel to 
the Dauphin. 

This was the beginning, and the reader knows already 
what very much larger projects occupied the mind of 
Catherine de Medicis, who wanted an important palace, 
and built part of the Tuileries, which she hardly ever 
used. Her palace has already been described; her 
garden was an exceedingly formal affair, so that a map 
of it looks like the map of an ancient Roman city, with 
alleys always crossing each other at right angles. It 
was bounded to the north by a long riding-school, sit- 
uated where the Rue de Rivoli is now, and to the west 
by a bastion close to the present Place de la Concorde. 



Parks and Gardens. 179 

The garden of Catherine de Medicis was in its perfec- 
tion in the latter part of the sixteenth century, but it 
was altered to conform to later fashions. A century 
later the great principle of the right angle was aban- 
doned, and both acute and obtuse angles, with segments 
of circles, were freely employed in the outhnes of the 
beds, while their internal floral decoration was in flour- 
ishes of unrestrained curvature. In the latter half of 
the eighteenth century the flower-beds were restricted 
to a Hmited space in front of the palace, and beyond 
this were trees in plantations crossed by alleys at right 
andes. This arrangement has in the main been pre- 
served to the present day, except that the flower-garden 
is now laid out differently ; yet even here there is some 
respect for the old plan in the preservation of the ba- 
sins and in the outline of the four sections westward 
of the great basin. The sections nearest the Louvre 
have been laid out afresh; the large octagonal basin 
near the Place de la Concorde remains exactly as it was 
a hundred years ago. Not one of the basins dates from 
the original garden of Catherine de Medicis. 

The connection of cause and effect has seldom been 
more remarkable than in this instance. A bad smell 
which enters the palace of a royal lady in the sixteenth 
century is the reason why a great Republican city in 
the nineteenth has a garden for recreation precisely in 
the most convenient place. One special function of 
royalty in France appears to have been to prepare 
pleasant places for its heirs and successors, the people. 
It is well that the people know the value of such places. 



1 80 Paris. 

The destruction of the Tuileries by the Communards 
was an exceptional act committed by a small minority 
in an hour of frenzied exasperation; the French peo- 
ple generally are fond of architecture and gardens, and 
proud to possess them. The garden of the Tuileries is 
likely to be preserved to a very remote future. At the 
present time it may be described as a sort of wood 
between two ornamental spaces. The trees in the wood 
(principally horse-chestnut and lime trees) make a no- 
ble avenue down the middle; but the ground beneath 
them is a desert trodden constantly by thousands, so 
that there is hardly room for a single blade of grass. 
At the east end of the garden the lawns are protected 
and kept in great perfection, as they are in all the pub- 
lic gardens of Paris. What the French call the salles 
de verdure of the Tuileries are, with their statues and 
the massive trees beyond, very beautiful examples of 
the classic taste in gardening. 

When the lawns are only protected by low borders 
children are tolerated upon them. The garden of the 
Tuileries is the earthly paradise of Parisian childhood; 
and for any person of mature years who takes pleasure 
in watching the ways of children, a quiet seat there is 
an excellent post of observation. The extreme quick- 
ness and mobility of the French nature, and especially 
of the Parisian nature, are never better seen than in the 
children of the Tuileries. The wonder is that children 
can play so freely and happily when they are so fash- 
ionably dressed ; the explanation must be, that as they 
are always dressed in that manner when out of doors 



Parks and Gardens. 



ibi 



they live in a state of unconsciousness of fine clothes, 
which would be impossible in the country. The dress- 
ing of children is carried too far in all French towns ; 
it seems as if they were little dolls for milhners to try 
expensive experiments upon. Any person who takes 
an interest in such matters has only to go and hsten to 






^^^ 

H^^ 




c^c' ^JuS- J If PWd 



GRANDE ALLEE DES TUILERIES. 



a band on a sunny afternoon, when he will see a num- 
ber of over-dressed little beings disporting themselves 
prettily enough. 

The great defect of the Tuileries garden is the un- 
interesting nature of the ground itself, — a dead level, 



1 82 Paris. 

enclosed by straight lines. The terraces are an excep- 
tion, though they also are straight, and seem to me 
wearisome; but this is merely a personal impression, 
and I know that there are many people who take 
a mysterious pleasure in walking on gravel flat as a 
barrack-yard between two monotonous rows of trees. 
What is really noble and remarkable in this garden is 
the frequent combination of sculpture and architecture 
with foliage, — a combination that never loses its charm, 
as the severe lines of stone and marble, and their gray 
or white color, excite in the eye a longing for the grace- 
ful masses of foliage and a desire for the priceless re- 
freshment of its green. It is curious how little of a loss 
to the garden has been the destruction of the palace. 
Its removal has opened the magnificent perspective of 
Visconti's Louvre, which is quite sufficiently massive 
and imposing to fill up a distance effectively.^ 

The most complete contrast to the garden of the 
Tuileries is the Pare des Buttes Chaumont, situated 

1 It has been for some time proposed to erect a new palace of art on the 
site of the Tuileries, but the French Parliament has hitherto refused to 
sanction the plan. However, a Parisian friend tells me that M. Gamier, 
the well-known architect of the Opera, has prepared drawings for such 
an edifice, which is likely to be erected in course of time. There is evi- 
dently no intention of joining it to the pavilions de Flore and de Marsan, 
as they have new and magnificent fronts where such a juncture would 
have to be effected. The new palace, therefore, will probably be a com- 
pletely isolated building, or else it may be connected with the pavilions 
by a light open screen in the form of an arcade. Whatever is done, it 
may be taken as certain that, with the present accumulated experience 
of the style, any modern Parisian architect of proved ability will produce 
a far better work than the old palace of the Tuileries ultimately became, 
and one much more in accordance with the buildings erected by Visconti, 
henceforth inevitably dominant over the whole edifice. 



Parks and Gardens. 



183 



in a place that seems quite out of the way of visitors, 
though great numbers of them go there. It is near 
the northeastern corner of Paris, between the Boulevard 
de la Villette and the fortifications. There is a natural 
hill belonging to the high ground of Belleville, and this 
hill was partly cut up into quarries, chiefly plaster quar- 
ries, which left a broken and precipitous appearance, 



•'X'' 



f^ 
















LAC DES BUTTES CHAUMONT. 



suggestive of great possibilities to the enterprise of a 
modern landscape-gardener. When this part of the 
city was laid out afresh in the year 1866, it was deter- 
mined to reserve the roughest and most hilly portion 
of the ground as a pleasure-ground, greatly needed by 
that populous and unfashionable quarter. It is not very 
extensive, only sixty-one English acres ; and this want 



1 84 Paris. 

of size is a serious defect, because one sees the sur- 
rounding houses too closely and too easily for the illu- 
sion of wild scenery to be possible; but it is very 
amusing and interesting to see with what extreme inge- 
nuity the clever gardeners have made the most of their 
opportunity. By the help of a little willingness to be 
deluded, the visitor may imagine himself to be, — not in 
Scotland or Wales certainly, nor indeed in wild natural 
scenery anywhere, but in some picturesque park in 
Derbyshire ; and to get so much of Nature as that is a 
great thing indeed in Paris. There is a pond, of course ; 
but this pond excels most others in the possession of a 
precipitous rocky island, approached by a suspension- 
bridge from one shore, and by a lofty arch from another, 
and on the top of the island is a copy of the little tem- 
ple of Vesta at Tivoli. Besides this, the land in the 
park rises to a considerable height in a steep green hill 
of pleasant shape with a wooded crown, and a rivulet 
makes music- as it flows and falls happily from the wood 
to the lake. The water, no doubt, is real water, and the 
stones that it flows over are real stones, though placed 
there by human labor; neither is there any deception 
about the aquatic plants that grow gayly by its margin ; 
but how comes the rivulet there? What is "The 
Stream's Secret " ? Alas, for poetry ! The secret in 
this case is a steadily toiling steam-engine on the banks 
of St. Martin's Canal, which persuades the water to go 
up the hill in a pipe, that it may come down again as 
we see. And now that I have told the stream's secret 
I will go yet a little further and tell mine, which is that 




LE TROCADERO. 



Parks and Gardens. 185 

the poor little imitation rivulet seems to me distinctly 
and decidedly the pleasantest thing in Paris. 

The park possesses a cave, which is impressive from 
its height, but wanting in the obscure depth of the 
great caverns, which inspires one with a sort of vague 
apprehension ; and in the cave is another purling rivu- 
let, so that the place is a paradise of shade and coolness 
in the sultry Parisian summer. From the temple, and 
also from several different places on the higher ground 
of the park, the views of Paris are very extensive ; but 
they do not answer in all respects to its great reputa- 
tion for beauty. It is true that in the remote distance 
you have hazy visions of towers and domes, and, as in 
all such city views, the sublimity of what seems an 
infinite world of houses; but you have also, in close 
proximity to the park itself, a region studded with long 
chimneys belonging to works of various kinds, and 
bearing a very close resemblance — I will not say to 
Liverpool or Manchester, for that would be an exag- 
geration — but at any rate to one of our minor manu- 
facturing towns. The number of long chimneys in or 
near Paris has increased during recent years. Industry 
has made more visible progress than art, and there 
is some ground for the apprehension that in course 
of time the French capital may lose her beauty from 
this cause. The long chimneys interfere, even now, 
with the beauty of distant views. From the parapet 
near the Passy stairs I counted sixty-three of them this 
year, looking down the Seine and a little to the left. 
To a visitor from the north of England they are a 



1 86 



Paris. 



reminder of home; but as English chimneys are 
equally tall, and emit smoke not less abundantly, 
why travel so far southward to see others of the same 
kind? The French are rather proud of them; their 
artists paint them in big pictures of the Seine, their in- 
dustriels have them engraved for their advertisements. 




AVENUE DES CHAMPS ELYSEES. 



Of recent improvements in Paris, there is nothing 
prettier or more needed than the garden on the slope 
between the Palace of the Trocadero and the river. It 
has been extended by another garden on the opposite 
bank of the Seine, taken from the Champ de Mars, and 
which now seems a continuation of the Trocadero 
Garden joined by the Pont d'Jena. The Champ de 
Mars now ends in a sort of terrace with a balustrade ; 



Parks and Gardens. 187 

and on a fine starlight night a visitor can hardly spend 
an hour in a manner more likely to be remembered 
afterwards than in quietly leaning on that balustrade, 
and giving himself up to the influences of the strange 
and wonderful scene. Behind him is the vast, open, 
desert space of the Champ de Mars, silent and empty 
as so much land in the Sahara, and yet which has been 
the theatre of so many historical spectacles. There is 
no place in the world where the contrast between past 
and present — between many different pasts and the 
one monotonous present — is so striking and decided. 
No place in the world presents such a perfect tabula 
rasa, unless it be some area of salt water where fleets 
have fought and tempests raged, and where to-day no 
sound or motion disturbs the summer calm. The gar- 
den of the Tuileries was the chief scene of the Festi- 
val of the Supreme Being when Robespierre made a 
speech full of piety and virtue, and burnt the effigies of 
Atheism, Ambition, Self-seeking, and False Simplicity. 
Yet that memorable festival was also celebrated on the 
Champ de Mars ; and on the next great occasion, 
the Festival of Federation, the whole ceremony took 
place there in the presence of three hundred thousand 
spectators, who stood upon embankments laboriously 
raised on purpose. Stood ! nay, they sang and danced, 
in an ebullition of patriotic happiness. There was an 
altar in the middle, — atitel de la patrie ; and there was 
a throne near the military school, whereon sat poor 
Louis XVI., whose head still preserved its connection 
with his body. Talleyrand said mass, Lafayette rode 



i88 



Paris. 



about on a white horse. There was a great deal of 
solemn taking of oaths, in which the King and the 
President of the Assembly took part. After this, we 
learn that the federes, while they stayed in Paris, dis- 
played a sincere enthusiasm for the king, the queen, 
the little dauphin, the constitution, and the Assembly. 




AU JARDIN DU LUXEMBOURG. 



In 1815 the desert of the Champ de Mars was covered 
with another crowd; there was an altar once again, 
with an officiating prelate, and a throne with another 
sovereign. It was now the Champ de Mai, though the 
ceremony took place on the ist of June, — that fateful 
month which was to contain the date of Waterloo. 



Parks and Gardens. 189 

Napoleon came in coronation state, with a silken coat, 
a feathered cap, and the imperial mantle, in a state 
coach drawn by eight horses. Like Louis XVL, he, 
too, sat upon a throne, and received homage, and 
gazed over an ocean of human beings. Thiers says 
that almost the whole population of Paris was in the 
Champ de Mars that day; and it is certain that there 
were fifty thousand soldiers and a hundred pieces of 
artillery. It was the last imperial ceremony of the 
First Empire. When Napoleon laid aside the imperial 
mantle that day, as he left the throne to distribute 
colors, he had done forever with imperial state. Noth- 
ing remained for him but a fortnight of rough life as a 
soldier, to be followed by a crushing defeat, a wretched 
exile, and a miserable death. 

There has been no public ceremony in more recent 
times so memorable as the Champ de Mai, but many of 
us remember the military reviews of the Second Em- 
pire, which were very striking spectacles of their kind ; 
and then came the great exhibitions with their enor- 
mous buildings, which have vanished like enchanted- 
palaces in fairy tales. Changes which in other parts of 
Paris have required centuries are effected in a year or 
two on the Champ de Mars. Its permanent condition 
is that of perfect emptiness and aridity, but occasionally 
it is the scene of wonderful concentrations of humanity. 
The exhibition of 1867 is like a page of ancient history 
already. How remote it seems ! I remember, as if it 
were yesterday, the Emperor arriving on the opening 
day, accompanied by his wife and child, and looking 



1 90 Paris. 

neither well nor happy. Coming events were already 
casting their shadows. A German waiter calmly told 
me that there would soon be a war between France 
and Prussia, and he looked forward to the result with 
confidence. The Empire was already tottering, nobody 
counted upon its long continuance. When the next 
great exhibition palace had been erected in 1878 the 
object of the display was a revival of cheerful energy 
after dispiriting disaster. It was a far more imposing 
structure than the first, and surrounded by quite a town 
of buildings filled with the densest crowds. Now, again, 
the Champ de Mars is a tabula rasa, and all that is to 
be seen across its vast expense at night is perhaps the 
lamp of a solitary cab crossing near the Ecole Militaire, 
and proving the distance by the excessive apparent 
slowness of its motion. 

The Trocadero Palace, which is left as a permanent 
legacy of the Exhibition of 1878, has often been se- 
verely criticised on account of its large protuberant cen- 
tral body and its great curving arms. French people 
say it is like Victor Hugo's " Pieuvre," but these criti- 
cisms can only be applicable when the building is seen 
from a little distance. From the Champ de Mars it 
presents a most imposing appearance, especially on a 
fine night. The site is incomparable. The whole width 
of the building has a clear space before it for nearly 
fifteen hundred metres, and it stands upon a stately 
height, from which a beautiful garden slopes down, at 
first rapidly, then more gently, to the river, crossed 
there by one of the finest of its bridges; then comes 










^^ii 






Parks and Gardens. 191 

another wide space of garden, and beyond that the 
Champ de Mars. When the sky is full of stars and all 
this scene covered with lights like an illumination, it is 
enough to inspire a poet, and would in itself be in the 
highest degree poetical if it were not so modern and so 
easily accessible. Only forget that it is in familiar Paris, 
a day's journey from London, forget that these are 
gaslights, imagine that those stately domes, those lofty 
towers, are the dwelling of some mighty and myste- 
rious Oriental potentate, and by getting rid of the ob- 
trusive commonplace and familiar, you may enjoy the 
real magnificence of the scene. On one occasion, the 
National Festival of 1883, especial art was employed to 
enhance the beauty of the spectacle, and then it reached 
a degree of splendor that no Eastern sovereign ever 
attempted. 

The French have a great liking for open and exten- 
sive city views. If London belonged to them, they 
would clear away all the buildings between the British 
Museum and Oxford Street, if they did not carry a 
broad avenue down to the Strand. The feeling of 
openness in Paris is immensely enhanced by the way 
in which several different spaces are often happily com- 
bined. A man's garden gains in apparent liberty by 
the width of his neighbor's field. The garden of the 
Tuileries has the Place de la Concorde and then the 
Champs Elysees, with the long and broad avenue be- 
yond, up to the triumphal arch. There is a general 
feeling of openness about the Seine, with the Champs 
Elysees on one hand and the Esplanade des Invalides 



192 



Paris. 



on the other. As for the Elysian Fields themselves, 
they need no detailed description. They do not seem 
to be very much of an Elysium, but they offer shade 




LA NAUMACHIE, — PARC DE MONCEAU. 



and seats and cool draughts of Vienna beer. The word 
" fields " is too ambitious. There is nothing here but a 
little wood with tidy walks, and grass kept green by 
perpetual spray, — altogether a pleasant small substitute 
for real nature, hke the rivulet fed by the steam-engine. 



Parks and Gardens. 193 

The Palais de I'lndustrie here is better named perhaps 
than if it had been more ambitiously entitled a Palace 
of Art, since the pictures at the annual Salons arc chiefly 
industrial products on an extensive scale. The crudity 
of color which used to be the pecuHar distinction of in- 
experienced English painting has of late years been 
attained, or surpassed, by a multitude of energetic 
frenchmen; and as they combine with it a national 
delight in self-assertion and a peculiar enjoyment of the 
horrible, the present Salons are not by any means scenes 
of unmixed or refined pleasure, though held in the 
Elysian Fields. 

The garden of the Luxembourg is one of the most 
frequented places of recreation in Paris, and it is much 
to be regretted that in the latter days of the Empire it 
was diminished by cutting off a large acute-angled tri- 
angle at the upper end of the pepinQre, to make room 
for the Rue de I'Abbe de I'^fipee and other streets. Some 
important buildings, including the Ecole des Mines, the 
Pharmacie Centrale des Hdpitaux, and a large new 
Lycee, have been erected on ground that formerly be- 
longed to the nursery or the garden of the Luxembourg, 
and this at a time when the rapid increase of Paris in 
every direction made it more than ever desirable to pre- 
serve all open spaces with the most jealous care. It was 
a piece of economy, and of very unpopular economy, the 
only practical reason in its favor being that the new Rue 
de I'Abbe de I'l^pee rendered communication a little 
easier. In the remaining ground there are five pretty 
gardens with lawns and a considerable number of paral- 

13 



1 94 Paris. 

lelograms planted with trees ; and these, with the more 
or less open spaces between them, serve as playgrounds 
for the children. The eastern side of the garden is the 
favorite resting-place for grown-up people, who sit there 
on many hundreds of chairs. What I have called es- 
pecially the gardens are spaces laid out as lawns, with 
winding walks, a sufficiency of trees for shade, and plenty 
of garden-seats. The lovers of tranquillity seek these 
retreats, and sit quietly watching the fine spray that 
spurts from the water-pipes on the lawn and makes little 
rainbows over the grass. There are landscape-painters 
who have studios in that quarter and who prize these 
little gardens, not as if they were wild nature, but for the 
degree of refreshment they afford to eyes weary of walls 
and pavements. 

The woods of Boulogne and Vincennes both lie 
immediately outside the fortifications, and are good 
specimens of what the French understand by pleasure- 
grounds. Both have artificial lakes of considerable 
size with islands, and the woods are pierced in various 
directions by well-kept roads. Although the recreation- 
grounds within the walls of Paris are much smaller than 
the London Parks, the Bois de Boulogne is very much 
larger. Its area considerably exceeds two thousand 
acres, which is much more than that of all the London 
parks put together, and it includes about sixty miles of 
rides and drives. Almost every reader of these pages 
will be aware already that the Bois de Boulogne is the 
resort of all Parisians who can afford to keep carriages 
and horses ; and it is visited on holidays by many 



Parks and Gardens. 1 95 

thousands of the middle and working classes. I heartily 
appreciate the wisdom of setting apart a great space of 
land for public recreation, the noise and crowding of 
city life make such places necessary, and if they were 
not firmly protected now the future would be entirely 
deprived of them ; but I cannot say that the Bois de 
Boulogne has ever seemed to me delightful. Any 
country lane that winds about among fields, and crosses 
a stream here and there, now hiding itself in a dell, now 
affording a view from a little eminence, suits my taste 
far better than well-kept carriage-drives between dense, 
monotonous groves of green. The Bois de Boulogne 
is one of those places in which a lover of real landscape 
feels himself to be most a prisoner. The very perfec- 
tion with which it is all kept is enough to make him 
long for a little uncared-for nature. It is dif^cult to im- 
agine any more tiresome form of recreation than that of 
a wealthy Frenchman, who has himself dragged along 
those miles and miles of road past millions of trees that 
always seem the same. The real amusement of such a 
Frenchman is to criticise people and equipages ; but he 
might enjoy equal facilities for such a mental occupation 
on a chair in the Champs Elysees. 

The prettiest public garden in Paris is the Pare Mon- 
ceau, not to be in any way confounded with what we call 
a park in England, yet a piece of ground very tastefully 
laid out with undulating lawns, shady trees, statues, and 
a little sheet of water, that reflects a Corinthian colon- 
nade in a half-circle. Nothing can be more elegant 
than this colonnade, which has been preserved from the 



196 Paris. 

times of the early French Renaissance, but nobody knows 
exactly from what palace or monument it was taken. 
In its present situation it seems like a remnant of an- 
tique architecture in some graceful picture by Claude, 
and one is grateful for the good sense that has saved it 
from destruction. Lalanne once made a very poetical 
charcoal drawing of it, which has been reproduced in 
the series of his charcoals. This is one example the 
more of the happy combination of architecture with 
foliage and water. Set up in the British Museum, 
these columns would signify comparatively little; but 
with graceful foliage and a mirror of water, they are 
charming. 



XI. 

MODERN PARISIAN ARCHITECTURE. 

OF all modern cities Paris is the one in which the 
notion of architecture is most generally prevalent. 
In London, as in all our English towns, the ordinary 
builders have worked without any notion of architecture 
at all, and the real architect has seldom been called in 
unless to erect some important public building. In 
Paris architecture of some kind is very common. Thou- 
sands of houses have been erected with a definite archi- 
tectural intention; and this architectural tendency has 
of late years become so habitual that in the better quar- 
ters of the city a building hardly ever rises from the 
ground unless it has been designed by some architect 
who knows what art is, and endeavors to apply it to 
little things as well as great. 

Modern Parisian architecture has settled definitely 
into a new form of Renaissance. I find it convenient 
to separate the early elegant Renaissance (of which 
there are still some charming examples in France, full 
of graceful art and invention, combined with delicate 
finish in workmanship) from the heavy, ascetic Renais- 
sance that followed it, in which there was no enjoyment, 
no fancy, no delicacy, no imagination, and scarcely a 



1 98 Paris. 

trace of any other feeling than pure pride in size, and 
cost, and heaviness. The Hotel de Ville and the Court 
of the Louvre belong to the elegant Renaissance. St. 
Eustache is an attempt to marry that Renaissance with 
Gothic, but the west front of St. Eustache is in that 
tiresome style which in my own mind I always think of 
as the stupid eighteenth-century Renaissance. Now the 
effort of modern French domestic architects has been to 
start afresh with a second elegant Renaissance, and in a 
great measure they have succeeded. They have eman- 
cipated themselves from the . dulness and heaviness of 
their immediate predecessors ; they have allowed them- 
selves some variety, some free play of the fancy and 
intelligence; and although their art is seldom strikingly 
imaginative, it is full of interesting experiments. A 
firmly prejudiced visitor from another country might 
easily shut his eyes against it altogether, and say that 
it is all exactly alike, because it is generally governed 
by the prevailing taste of the time ; but the real inter- 
est of it consists in the variety that underlies a general 
fashion. The fashion is a cheerful and free Renaissance ; 
the variety consists in the use of as much freedom as is 
compatible with a dominant idea. 

A few experiments have been tried with mediaeval 
forms, or with mediaevalism passing into Renaissance ; 
and one of the most successful of these latter is the 
building of the Historical Society in the Boulevard St. 
Germain ; but true Gothic has been definitively and 
wisely abandoned. It has been wisely abandoned be- 
cause the pointed window-head never looks its best 



Modern Parisian Architecture. 199 

unless there is either a gable or a larger Gothic arch 
above it. A Gothic window does not look well in a 
room with a flat ceiling, and a row of Gothic windows 
do not look in their right place under a long straight 
cornice, like those in a modern street. Under the gables 
of a mediaeval street they might look better, but a row 
of gables, like the teeth of a saw, is neither the most 
rational nor the most economical form of roofing for 
street houses, and it has been finally and completely 
abandoned. You may, it is true, fill up your Gothic 
window-head with a tympanum in the shape of an in- 
verted shield, and so get a square head for the real 
window inside, but such a process is unnecessarily ex- 
pensive. Evidently the plain course was to adopt the 
straight head, the simple horizontal stone of classic 
architecture, and that settled the question in favor of 
Renaissance forms. The condition of another art may 
also have had its influence. Modern French sculpture 
comes almost directly from antiquity; it has come from 
Greece and Rome through the Renaissance; it has not 
come out of Gothic forms by evolution. Modern French 
sculptors can be trained to do something that will pass 
with unobservant people as a substitute for Gothic sculp- 
ture, but it is not natural to them. They try to make 
their work naif, but they only succeed in making it stiff"; 
they have not the true Gothic naivete, and they cannot 
have it; they cannot have that delightful blending of 
pre-scientific simplicity with deep feeling and shrewd 
observation which characterized Gothic art. They know 
far too much, and when they feel, they do not feel in 



200 Paris. 

that manner. Now there are great numbers of sculptors in 
Paris who have received a considerable amount of artistic 
instruction, but who cannot keep themselves by making 
statues that only the Government buys, so these men 
turn their talents to ornamental sculpture. Their edu- 
cation in art has been wholly classical, and their prac- 
tical influence upon modern architecture has been very 
considerable, because the architects know exactly what 
sort of ornamental work the carvers are fit to do. In 
short, the sort of domestic architecture that naturally 
springs from the Parisian mind, such as education has 
fashioned it, must be a form of Renaissance architec- 
ture, and none other. A literary critic has remarked 
that we are much nearer, intellectually, to the classic 
authors than to the mediaeval ones ; and it is not less 
true that the architects and workmen of modern Paris 
work in Renaissance forms as naturally, and when left 
to themselves as inevitably, as they speak French. Such 
forms have no longer anything of an imported style ; 
they seem as much a product of the soil as if they had 
been invented by the ancient Gauls. ^ 

1 I remember trying, many years ago, to get an oak pedestal carved in 
Paris. It was supported by three griffins, and I had drawn Gothic 
griffins, but the carvers I applied to immediately made sketches of Re- 
naissance griffins, and said they would do much better. As that was 
the transformation I had been most anxious to avoid (for the particular 
piece of furniture in question), I gave up the project. The carvers were 
highly intelligent workmen, yet quite incapable of conceiving anything 
that was not in a Renaissance spirit. I had another example of the same 
difficulty afterwards. A French draughtsman was employed to copy with 
the pen, for photographic reproduction, a series of pictures by an English 
pre-Raphaelite artist. In making the copies he eliminated all the pre- 
Raphaelite characteristics of feeling and style, and substituted those of 



Modern Parisian Architecture. 201 

Any adequate account of modem architecture in 
Paris would require a volume to itself, and such an 
account could not be made interesting or intelhgible 
without the help of minute and abundant architectural 
eno-raving, while it would find few readers outside the 
special public that really studies architectural subjects. 
All that can be done here is to give a general account 
of prevailing tendencies. The reader who cares to 
follow out the subject may do so with the help of the 
works issued by the Parisian architects themselves. 

The mediaeval arrangement was to turn the gable 
towards the street, and in a mediaeval city every house 
had its own gable, whence the old French expression 
concerning a well-to-do citizen that he had pignon 
sur rue. Nothing strikes us more in the old engravings 
of Paris than the wonderful number of gables, especially 
round such open spaces as the Place de Greve and the 
Cimetiere des Innocents. Many of these survived until 
the eighteenth century, but they belong essentially to 
Gothic times. The greatest clearing away of gables 
appears to have taken place in the seventeenth century, 
after having been begun a hundred years earlier or 
more. Under Louis XIV. every house-builder appears 
to have turned the eaves towards the street like the 
architects of the present day; and as in succeeding 
reigns the old houses were finally removed from the 

the Renaissance, thereby, of course, entirely falsifying the intentions of 
the original painter. I believe he did this quite unconsciously ; at any 
rate, he was evidently incapable of supposing that the peculiar interest 
of the originals lay precisely in those very characteristics that he 
eliminated. 



202 Paris, 

bridges and quays the eyes of the citizens became more 
and more accustomed to continuity of Hne. 

Still, although the eaves were turned towards the 
street, the gable was not entirely abolished, because it 
occurred at the end of every row of houses. Instead 
of being innumerable, the gables had become few, but 
that was the extent of the change. Now in modern 
Paris the gable is entirely abolished except in a few 
private mansions where the owner has followed his 
own taste; and the abolition of the gable is one of 
the most important of all decisive changes. It cuts 
modern architecture completely adrift from mediaeval. 
And please observe that this revolution has not been 
accomphshed, as in London, by the abolition of the 
visible roof. There are plenty of streets in London 
where you cannot see the roofs of the opposite houses. 
In Paris it is not so. There the roof is rightly felt to 
be of the greatest expressional importance ; but instead 
of ending with a gable, it is truncated either with a 
roof sloping at the same angle as the other, or with 
a curve when the rest of the roof is arched. The value 
of .space in Parisian houses has led to the very general 
adoption of arched or bulging roofs, which have the 
advantage of allowing so much more head-room, a 
truth well known to all who use tents and wagons. In 
cases where the curve is not employed, the roof often 
begins by being exceedingly steep and then comes to 
an angle from which it slopes back rapidly to the ridge, 
and in the steep part of it there is a row of dormer 
windows. 



Modern Parisian Architecture. 203 

The modern Parisian house, then, is characterized 
by a visible roof, curved or angular, with dormer win- 
dows in it, but not any gable either towards the street 
or at the end. The windows are flat-headed, they are 
very frequently provided with an entablature and with 
lateral mouldings, while in a great number of the bet- 
ter class of houses the stonework that surrounds the 
window is carved more or less elaborately, but almost 
always with knowledge and good taste. Great use 
has been made of balconies as an element of archi- 
tectural interest and an excuse for tasteful decoration. 
They are always supported on massive stone brackets 
which in every instance show at least an attempt at 
design, while many of them are beautiful in form and 
enriched with excellent ornamental sculpture. The 
doorways, in modern houses, are generally of impor- 
tance. The French habit of living on flats makes one 
doorway the entrance to many dwellings, so that an 
amount of ornament may be lavished upon it which 
would be extravagant and impossible for a single 
tenant. The finest ot such doorways consist of a 
lofty stone arch decorated with sculpture and filled 
with a tympanum of oak with folding-doors below, 
large enough for the passage of carriages. The wood- 
work is thoroughly sound and well finished, very strong 
and massive, and left almost of its natural color, but 
varnished. Carving is employed on the woodwork, 
but generally in moderation, and always in perfect 
keeping with the stone-carving on the rest of the edi- 
fice. There is also a taste for massive handles plated 



204 



Paris. 



with nickel or silver and set in small slabs of marble. 
Up in the panels of the tympanum there is often a 
window belonging to the entresol ; and when this occurs 




DOORWAY OF A MODERN HOUSE. 

the surroundings of the window in mouldings, carvings, 
and panels are as carefully designed, though in wood- 
work, as the masonry of the house itself. In such 
a house there is not an inch of surface from roof to 



Modern Parisian Architecture. 205 

basement that is not ruled by thoughtful care and 
taste, accompanied by sufficient knowledge. I do not 
speak of genius and inspiration, these are as rare in 
architectural as in literary work ; but it is a great thing 
to have banished ignorance and bad taste. It is a great 
thing, too, that house-builders should have got well 
out of that negative condition of perfect dulness, of 
incapacity to desire or apprehend the beautiful, which 
produced such houses as those in Harley Street. Even 
in Paris itself, although the builders from Louis XIV. to 
Louis Napoleon sometimes erected interesting separate 
mansions, they treated houses in rows with wearisome 
monotony whenever they had power to build a row of 
houses at all. The last houses on the Pont au Change, 
which were finished in 1647 ^"^^ demolished in 1788, 
were as dull as domestic architecture of the last century 
in London. The supplementary buildings of the Hotel 
Dieu on the left bank of the Seine, which were com- 
pleted in the eighteenth century, had not more archi- 
tecture than a cotton-mill, and the houses behind them 
were no better. The pretty modern Parisian house 
does not date farther back than Louis Napoleon, and 
at first it was monotonously repeated. The desire for 
variety came in due course, but it was only towards 
the close of the reign that the possibilities of the new 
style came to be thoroughly understood. It still re- 
quires, I think, a more obvious and clearly visible 
variety, though it is easy to fall into the common error 
of not observing the degree of variety that there is. 
More will have to be said about street architecture in 



2o6 Paris. 

the next chapter. For the present I desire to point 
out a pecuhar effect of the increased attention paid 
to the architecture of houses. Since so many of the 
houses liave been made lofty and beautiful, many new- 
public buildings have been very strongly influenced by 
them, both as to their proportions and their style of 
architecture. Some readers will remember an absurdly 
small church at Geneva with a miniature tower, which 
is surrounded by very lofty modern houses. In a 
village of low cottages such a church would look re- 
spectable ; at Geneva it is hke a model set there for 
the people to look down upon from their windows. 
On the contrary, Rouen Cathedral gains by contrast 
with the old-fashioned houses close to it, which are 
not on a great scale. The merit of Parisian architects 
is to have perceived the new necessities in public build- 
ings created by streets of magnificent private dwellings. 
If the ordinary architecture of a city is on a large 
scale and richly decorated, its public buildings must 
still distinguish themselves by greater richness. One 
consequence of the reconstruction of Parisian dwell- 
ings has been the rebuilding, in whole or in part, of 
almost all those theatres that happened to be near 
new streets or squares. The Theatre Frangais had 
a new front; the Opera was rebuilt with unparalleled 
magnificence ; the Vaudeville had a narrow but strik- 
ingly rich curved faqade at the corner of the Chaussee 
d'Antin, with Corinthian columns and Caryatides and 
a fronton crowned with a statue of Apollo. The new 
Theatre de la Renaissance is a heavy but sumptuous 



Modern Parisian Architecture. 207 

structure, also adorned with Caryatides and Corinthian 
columns. The Gaite was rebuilt in 1861 with a pretty 
arcade on marble columns in front of its open loggia. 
The Chatelet was built at the same date, and has also 
its loggia, but with statues under the five arches. The 
neighboring Theatre Historique, which used to be the 
Lyrique, was also built under Louis Napoleon, though 
it has been rebuilt since in consequence of incendiarism 
by the Communards. The construction of these build- 
ings, and of many others, was made a necessity by 
the handsome new houses. The Odeon belongs to the 
beginning of this century and is a plain, respectable 
structure. It may remain as it is because the houses 
near it are plain, old-fashioned dwellings of the same 
or an earher date; but if the Odeon could be placed 
where the Opera is now, it would be too simple for 
such a situation. 

Yes, the French understand the effect of neighbor- 
hood in architecture, an effect which may either com- 
pletely destroy or wonderfully enhance the charm and 
interest of a building. I wish it could be said that the 
English understood this equally well, or were equally 
ready to make the sacrifices that are necessary to protect 
a building from being injured by its neighbors. The 
French are not always careful enough, or, at least, not 
always successful, as we see in the injury inflicted by 
large buildings on Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle; 
still the principle is understood in Paris, and very few 
public buildings of any consequence are inadequate to 
the situations which they occupy. 



2o8 Paris. 

The most magnificent of recent structures, and one 
of the most happily situated, is the Opera. The situa- 
tion has been created for it purposely. The front might 
have looked merely across a street, but a new street of 
great length was opened, that it might be seen from a 
distance. Besides this, arrangements were made for the 
convergence of several other new streets in front of the 
Opera, so as to give to its site the utmost possible im- 
portance. As the houses in these streets are all of them 
lofty and many of them magnificent, the Opera itself 
required both size and richness to hold its own in a 
situation that would have been dangerous to a feeble or 
even a modest architectural performance. The Opera 
was compelled to assert itself strongly, and if it had 
merits they must be of a showy and visible kind, — 
rather those of the sunflower than those of the lily of 
the valley. There can be no question that M. Garnier 
aimed at the right kind of merit, — showy magnificence, 
— but there are two opposite opinions about his taste. 
Like all important contemporary efforts, the Opera has 
its ardent admirers and its pitiless critics. Let me tell 
a short anecdote about this building, which may help 
us in some measure to arrive at a just opinion. Shortly 
after its completion several distinguished men, who 
were not architects, met at a Parisian dinner-table, and 
they criticised M. Garnier with great severity. Among 
them was a provincial architect, who remained silent 
till the others appealed to him. Then he said : " Gentle- 
men, when an architect undertakes to erect a compara- 
tively small building it is still a very complex affair; 




THE OPERA. THE PRINCIPAL FRONT. 



Modern Parisian Architecture. 209 

and how much more so must be such a gigantic work 
as the Opera, where a thousand matters of detail and 
necessity have to be provided for, all of which the 
architect has to carry in his mind together, and to rec- 
oncile with the exigencies of art ! Such a task is one 
of the heaviest and longest strains that can be imposed 
upon the mind of man; and if the architect does not 
satisfy every one, it may be because other people are 
not aware of the extreme complexity of the problem," 
For me, I confess that I know really nothing about 
theatres, except that they have mysterious difficulties 
of their own, I hke being outside better than inside 
them, because to be outside is at the same time cooler 
and cheaper; and all I know about their peculiar form 
is that they generally have a gabled superstructure, 
which must be an awkward thing for an architect, and is 
in some way connected with scene-shifting, I humbly 
confess that the Parisian Opera seems to me a very odd 
sort of structure when seen from behind, and perhaps it 
might have been better to hide those parts of it. Yet I 
like to see the whole of an edifice, the complete work 
of the architect, and not merely a fine front, like the 
front of a shop. The truncated angles at the back have 
a decidedly weakening effect upon the design, but the 
corners were cut off in order that there might be an 
apparent correspondence between the building and the 
Rues Scribe and Gliick. The rotundas on the east and 
west sides have a good effect in breaking their mo- 
notonous length, and their domes make a good accom- 
paniment to the great flattened dome over the house. 

14 



2IO Paris. 

The principle followed everywhere has been to conform 
the exterior to the uses of the edifice, which is right. 
The exterior dissimulates nothing, and consequently it 
looks like nothing in the world but what it is, — a great 
theatre; whereas the Vaudeville might be taken for 
the entrance to a bank, and the Odeon for a scientific 
lecture-hall and museum. 

Whatever may be thought of the back and sides 
of the Opera, the principal front may be admired with- 
out reserve. The basement is a massive wall, finished 
plainly, and pierced with seven round arches. In the 
intervals between five of these arches are statues and 
medallions ; on each side of the two exterior ones are 
groups representing Music, Lyrical Poetry, the Lyrical 
Drama, and the Dance. The contrast here of extreme 
architectural simplicity with figure-sculpture is excel- 
lent. Above is a colonnade of coupled Corinthian 
columns supporting an entablature, and between each 
two pairs of columns is an open space, in which a lower 
and smaller entablature, with a wall above it, is sup- 
ported on smaller columns of marble. This wall is 
pierced in each interval with a circular opening con- 
taining the gilded bronze bust of a great musician. 
Above the great entablature, and immediately over 
each pair of coupled columns, is a medallion with sup- 
porters, and above each open space of the loggia is 
an oblong panel with sculpture. Then you come to the 
dome of the house and the gable of the structure above 
the stage. The effect of the whole is a combination 
of splendor with strength and durability. The use of 




INTERIOR OF TtiS CHURCH OF ST. AUGUSTINE. 



Modern Parisian Architecture. 211 

sculpture has been happy, and the sculpture has not 
been killed by the architecture, as it often is. On the 
other hand, it has lightened the appearance of the 
architecture, especially on the top of the edifice where 
the colossal winged figures are most valuable, — and so 
is that on the apex which holds up the lyre with both 
hands. 

With regard to the interior, my humble opinion — the 
opinion of one Avho knows nothing about theatres — is, 
that the business of plotting for splendor has been con- 
siderably overdone. T\\q foyer is palatial, but it is over- 
charged with heavy ornarnxnt, like the palace of some 
lavish but vulgar king. As for poor Paul Baudry's 
paintings on the ceiling, which cost him such an in- 
finity of labor and pains, it does not in the least signify 
what he painted or how long it will last, for nobody can 
see his work in its present situation. There can hardly 
be any more deplorable waste of industry and knowl- 
edge than to devote it to the painting of ceilings that 
we cannot look at without pains in the neck, and can- 
not see properly when we do look at them. The grand 
staircase is more decidedly a success than \\\e foyer. It 
almost overpowers us by its splendor ; it is full of daz- 
zling light ; it conveys a strong sense of height, space, 
openness ; it comes on the sight as a burst of brilliant 
and triumphant music on the ear. The mind has its 
own satisfaction in a work that is splendid without false 
pretension. All the materials are really what they seem. 
The thirty columns are monoliths of marble, every step 
is of white Italian marble, the hand-rail of onyx, sup- 



212 



Paris. 




THE CHURCH OF ST. AUGUSTINE. 



ported by balusters of rouge antique, on a base of green 
marble from Sweden. We may admire the grand stair- 
case or object to it, but it is honest work throughout, 



Moderjz Parisian Architecture.^ 2 1 3 

and may last a thousand years. The architect evidently 
took pride in it, as he has so planned the design that 
visitors may look down from galleries on four different 
stories all round the building. The house itself is much 
less original, with its decoration of red and gold, and the 
customary arrangements for the audience. 

House architecture in the modern streets of Paris has 
led the architects to attempt the solution of a very diffi- 
cult problem. They have endeavored, — I will not say 
to invent a new style of ecclesiastical architecture (for a 
really new style is not possible), but to adapt an old 
style in such a manner as to make it harmonize with the 
secular and domestic architecture of our own time. If 
the reader will glance back in memory at the styles of 
church architecture that have prevailed or been experi- 
mented upon since the beginning of French civilization, 
he will soon perceive that there really is not one of 
them that would not look isolated in a modern boule- 
vard. The Romanesque and Gothic styles, in all their 
varieties, look completely isolated. A classic temple 
like the Madeleine looks out of place for various rea- 
sons, especially for its want of height in comparison 
with modern houses, and its prison-like absence of 
openings, so different from the modern wall, pierced 
with many windows. The architect of St. Eustache 
made a most important experiment in the union of 
Gothic principles with the details of the elegant Renais- 
sance, but his example has not been followed. As for 
the dull and heavy architecture that I have ventured to 
call plainly the stupid Renaissance, it would look uglier 



214 



Paris. 



than ever if placed in the neighborhood of intelligent 
and inventive modern domestic building. Contempo- 




INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH OF LA TRINITE. 

rary Parisian architects have endeavored to solve the 
problem by a free expansion of Byzantine ideas. The 



Modern Parisian Architechire. 215 

most interesting of these experiments is the Church 
of St. Augustine, where stone and cast-iron have been 
employed together. The use of cast-iron has been 
ahnost entirely confined to the roof and dome. The 
nave is crossed by light iron arches, with spandrels 
of the same material; and from these arches a metal 
column comes down to the ground on each side, set 
against the stone pier like a pilaster. These iron arches 
carry depressed vaults corresponding to the bays. The 
dome is almost entirely metallic ; its ribs, and even the 
mullions of its windows, are of iron. Each bay of the 
nave consists of a round arch with three minor arches 
above it in the triforium gallery, themselves included in 
a higher arch, and in front of the triforium runs a gilded 
railing. The windows of the clerestory are round- 
arched, each with two lights, containing, in painted 
glass, figures of bishops or other ecclesiastics. Orna- 
ment is used in moderation, and is not in itself of an 
elaborate kind, a small lozenge-shaped or square panel 
being considered enough to vary a space of plain wall. 
The tympanum between the three small arches and the 
large one that includes them is richer. 

The interior of the church has certain merits in a 
very high degree. It is not only spacious and airy in 
reality, but it looks so. I have seldom found myself 
beneath a dome that seemed so light and lofty. The 
nave is of great width, but there are no aisles, and the 
lateral chapels are unfortunate in shape, owing to the 
site, which compelled M. Baltard, the architect, to make 
them narrower and narrower as they approach the 



2 1 6 Paris. 

principal entrance. The exterior has been considerably 
injured by this necessity, which gives the whole edifice 
the appearance of being huddled together. The towers 
are too close to the dome, and the front seems to 
require lateral support of some kind. Much of the in- 
terest of this church as a piece of work consists in the 
difficulty of the site. That may have been one of the 
reasons for the employment of iron in the roof, as it 
caused so much less outward thrust, and the building 
could not spread itself laterally. Whatever the reason, 
the iron has been skilfully used, and in that respect, as 
well as in the character of all the other arts employed, 
this church is thoroughly of our own time. 

The Church of La Trinite is another important exam- 
ple of modernism. The nave is very wide, and vaulted 
in a large round arch. The aisles are very narrow, and 
separated from the nave by an arcade of round arches 
supported on marble pillars between the piers. Above 
the aisles runs a lofty gallery, with a similar arcade and 
a pierced parapet. The space above the high altar is 
narrowed by the projection of two arcades, equal in 
height to those of the aisles, and finished by a contin- 
uation of the parapet just mentioned. There is a small 
apse behind. The church has a tower crowned with an 
octagonal dome and lantern, and flanked by two small 
lanterns, also with domes. The round arch is dominant 
everywhere, except over the niches and doors, where 
pediments have been frequently employed. In the per- 
fect finish of the workmanship, the richness and excel- 
lence of the materials, and a general air of palatial 




THE CHURCH OF LA TRINITE, 



Modern Parisian Architecture. 217 

elegance, this church is quite modern and Parisian. It 
is curious to observe how well it holds its place between 
two large blocks of houses built at the same date with 
itself, which have round arches over the entresol, and 
louvre windows not much unlike the upper niches, and 
pilasters recalling those at the angles of the church. 
Opposite the Trinite, the houses at the angles of the 
Chaussee d'Antin are finished with domes. The balus- 
trade immediately in front of the Trinite (behind the 
three fountains) is carried round the pretty garden, 
which seems in this way to belong to the church. For 
all these reasons this piece of ecclesiastical architecture 
is allied to its surroundings just as the Gothic cathe- 
drals were in the Middle Ages. 

Another example of the same modern style, founded 
upon the combination of the round arch with the classic 
capital, is the Church of St. Frangois Xavier, near the 
Invalides. This church is plainer and simpler than the 
Trinite, and much smaller than St. Augustine. It is 
not in any way imposing, but it is interesting as one of 
the most honest attempts of a modern architect to build 
in a modern way. Such work is far less unsatisfactory 
than a thin attempt at Gothic like St. Clotilde. 

In Paris, where there is really a modern style of do- 
mestic architecture, it is possible that in the future a 
corresponding ecclesiastical architecture may become 
habitual. Gothic is too remote from modern habits of 
design and too much isolated in the midst of modern 
houses. A heavy Renaissance like that of St. Sulpice 
is too much wanting in grace and cheerfulness. What 



2i8 Paris. 

really suits modern Paris is a sort of Renaissance, very 
delicate in workmanship everywhere, and combining 
readily with intelligent painting and sculpture. It 
should employ beautiful materials, fine marbles, gilded 
bronze, and other good modern metal-work. At St. 
Augustine the doors are in electrotype copper. Above 
all, the modern style should leave great liberty to the 
taste and fancy of each individual architect, because it 
is only in this way that any boldness of experiment can 
be possible, or any new ideas evolved. These modern 
churches show signs of real vitality, and in this respect 
are more hopeful than any mere pastiche of Gothic or 
Italian art. 



XII. 

THE STREETS. 

THE English have invented the hoitse, the French 
have invented the street. By this I do not ven- 
ture to affirm or undertake to maintain that nobody- 
lived in what were called houses before the existence 
of Englishmen, nor that ancient cities had not streets 
of some kind ; but I mean that the English are the first 
people whoTiave thoroughly understood the house and 
realized it, setting in this respect an example to other 
nations, and that the French are the first people who 
have thoroughly understood the street and realized a 
conception of it which has become a model of excel- 
lence in its own kind. 

An Englishman who finds himself in some great 
Parisian street quite of our own time, such as the Boule- 
vard Haussmann or the Boulevard Malesherbes, has 
nothing to do but simply confess that here is the ideal 
street,! and that his own Piccadilly and Oxford Street 

1 For our part of Europe and other temperate climates. It appears 
that narrow, tortuous streets, with overhanging stories and a space above 
that can be easily covered with an awning, are much preferable in hot 
countries. 



2 20 Paris. 

are not yet the ideal. A street should not only be wide, 
for the facility of traffic, but it should be of the same 
width throughout, that there may be no local obstruc- 
tion. The causeways for foot-passengers ought to be 
wide also, and there ought to be seats where they may 
rest when weary. Trees are not an absolute necessity, 
but next to space, air, and light, they are the greatest 
of all luxuries, not only for their shade, but for the 
delightful refreshment afforded by the green of their 
foliage in a wilderness of stone and mortar. With the 
blue sky and the passing clouds above, and the fresh 
green leaves on the trees, it seems as if nature were not 
quite banished yet. 

True lovers of Paris (I am simply an admirer, and 
have no sentiment of affection for the place) take a 
keen delight in those broad trottohs of the Boulevards. 
They walk upon them for the mere pleasure of being 
there, till absolute weariness compels them to sit down 
before a cafe ; and when the feelings of exhaustion are 
over, they rise to tire themselves again, like a girl at 
a ball. They tell one that the mere sensation of the 
Parisian asphaltum under the feet is an excitement 
itself, so that when aided by " little glasses " in the 
moments of rest at the cafes, it must be positively in- 
toxicating. These true lovers of Paris are most en- 
chanted with those parts of the Boulevards where the 
crowd is always so dense that all freedom of motion 
is impossible ; where half the foot-way is occupied by 
thousands of cafe chairs and the other half by a closely 
packed multitude of loungers. The favorite places 



The Streets. 221 

appear to be the Boulevard des Italiens and the Boule- 
vard Montmartre. The shops are, in fact, a great per- 
manent exhibition of industry and the fine arcs, wonder- 
fully lighted at night,^ and very attractive to those who 
visit Paris on rare occasions; but it is surprising how 
much of the illusion disappears after close and old 
acquaintance. You find the same things repeated, 
either identically or with slight changes that are easily 
seen through. It may not be exactly the same picture 
that you saw in the dealer's window three years ago, but 
very likely it will be the same kind of picture, set off in 
the same way by an enormously disproportionate frame 
on a background of dark red velvet, the whole so lighted 
that the gilding flames across the street. The bronzes 
are not quite the same perhaps, yet it is difficult to 
believe them new. There is the old green caricature- 
bronze, some meagre-limbed Mephistopheles ; there is 
the Barye or Cain animal bronze ; there are the multi- 
tudes of coppery girls, as evidently daughters of Paris 
as if they were dressed, and dressed in the fashion. 
Amid the glittering shops, where the object is to 
vanquish the eye by mere dazzle, you come upon the 
intensely respectable, excessively quiet shops, that in- 
vite only to repose. Nothing amuses me more in the 
French mind than its fine artistic faculty of taking up a 
motive and keeping to it. The faculty deserves hearty 
admiration, but the exercise of it is amusing because 
it is simply artistic, like acting, and has nothing to do 

1 On the old much-frequented Boulevards, but elsewhere early closing 
is beginning to prevail. 



2 2 2 Paris. 

with character. You pass a glaring, frivolous-looking 
shop, full of gayety and glitter, and then you meet with 
a dark-looking, quiet shop, that looks like a retreat for 
a profoundly meditative mind, and is severely finished 
in ebony and stamped leather. What is admirable in 
such places is the determination to keep out the in- 
congruous. It must be one of the keenest pleasures to 
plan a shop of the severe kind, to decide upon its sober 
colors, its rich yet simple decoration. I am not the 
inventor of the remark that the French have a genius 
for shop-keeping. Their love of neatness and order, 
their appreciation of pretty things, their talent for mak- 
ing the most of everything and showing it to the best 
advantage, all combine to make them masters in the 
art of managing a devantiire. The proverb, Marchandise 
bien paree est a moitie vendue, is a piece of French mer- 
cantile wisdom. There are all varieties in the art of 
exhibiting goods. One dealer overwhelms you with 
quantity, but that is an appeal to the vulgar. The 
opposite policy seems far more refined and crafty. I 
confess to a sincere admiration for the tempter who 
displays very few but very exquisite things, and has 
the art of arranging them so that they shall help each 
other. One Parisian dealer in works of art showed very 
little, yet had a great collection. " You could fill a 
museum," I said, and was told that he did not consider 
it good policy to show many things at once. 

The colossal shops that have sprung up in Paris of 
late years are beginning to employ architecture as an 
advertisement. The most curious instance of this is the 



The Streets. 223 

tower of the stables belonging to the Grands Magasins 
du Louvre. The stables are somewhere near the Ecole 
Militaire, and would of course be very easily overlooked 
by the public ; so to prevent this the proprietors have 
erected a tall slender tower, in shape somewhat resem- 
bling the clock-tower of the Houses of Parliament. It 
has much gilding about the top, and glitters in the sun- 
shine like its great neighbor the dome of the Invalides. 
It is visible all the way from Passy to the Place de la 
Concorde, and from many other places besides, so that 
thousands of people see it every day, and many of them 
ask what it is. The Printemps has established its stores 
in a new edifice with gilded domes at the corners, in 
pursuance of the same policy. If the great shop- 
keepers found it worth while to spend money on really 
fine architecture, instead of scattering it about in hid- 
eous mural advertisements, the change would be most 
beneficial. 

The magnificence of the great Parisian streets results 
from the habit of living in flats, as by this system a 
single house produces a large rental, which enables the 
builder to give it a magnificent front. It is obvious 
also that the superposition of dwellings is very favor- 
able to height, and height is a great element of nobility 
in architecture. There is, however, a limit beyond 
which the height of houses may become injurious to 
the effect of a street by excluding light, and injurious 
also to public buildings by making them seem low. 
There is a tendency in London to carry houses with 
flats to an altitude that is desirable neither for beauty 



224 Paris. 

nor security. This inconvenience has been prevented 
in Paris by poHce regulations. The Prefect of Police is 
empowered to fix the height of houses. 

It must, I fear, be admitted that the system of living 
on flats is likely to prevail more and more in great cities. 
It is, in fact, the only practical way of reconciling wide 
streets with a dense population. Parisians look upon it 
as simply rational, and they can point to their own city 
as evidence of the apparent spaciousness which results 
from it, for many of the streets and avenues are so 
broad that it seems as if land were of little value. The 
excellence of the system as regards external appearance 
and facility of communication is indisputable. When 
the population is piled high it occupies less ground and 
the distances are reduced. Streets that are at the same 
time both broad and regular in their breadth are always 
preferred by coachmen. On this point I have some- 
times taken the opinion of Parisian drivers, and they 
always agreed that the new streets had immensely 
facilitated their work. Tramways, also, can be estab- 
lished in such streets ; in the old narrow ones they are 
impossible. Broad, open spaces are favorable to public 
health, by giving to rooms that look out upon them as 
much light as if they were in the country, and almost 
as much air. Foot-passengers run no risk of accident 
except at crossings, while on narrow causeways the 
risks are continual. The system, then, is perfect so far 
as the street is concerned, and has some other great 
recommendations, but it is not altogether favorable to 
the dwelling. The dwellings are small, and the sense of 



The Streets. 225 

confinement in them is oppressive to any one who has 
been accustomed to space and hberty. Rents are so 
high that every family not positively rich is reduced to 
shifts and expedients. I know a young woman in the 
hills of the Morvan who went to Paris as a wet-nurse. 
She was in the family of an independent gentleman, 
with small or moderate means and eight children. He 
might have lived in the country quite at his ease, but 
the attraction of Paris was too great and he could not 
leave the capital. He had a small appartemejit at a 
great height, consisting of three rooms, a passage, and 
a little kitchen. At night all the rooms, including the 
passage, were converted into dormitories. The servants 
slept in the passage. We know what overcrowding is in 
London ; it is a terrible evil, but it affects the poor only, 
while in Paris it affects the middle classes also. The 
evil would be still greater if the Parisians were not so 
excessively ingenious in the economy of space; but 
they are hke sailors, in that they make use of every 
available corner. A practical result, as affecting hospi- 
tality, is that the middle-class Parisian can very rarely 
invite a friend to stay with him. The friend stays at 
some hotel, and is invited to the table only. Frequently 
the dining-room and kitchen are so small that it is found 
• more convenient to dispense hospitality at a restaurant. 
These are real evils, but not perhaps very serious evils ; 
the most serious evils of the system are those that affect 
old persons and invalids. People in weak health often 
remain confined in a high lodging for months together, 
when if they lived nearer to the ground and possessed a 

15 



2 26 Paris. 

garden they might go into it every day. The intermin- 
able stairs have a deterrent effect on all except robust 
visitors, and are a real obstacle to human intercourse. 
Perhaps the system of superposed habitations has not 
yet attained its perfection. It may be that in the future 
there will be an extensive system of perfectly safe lifts, 
and it may be possible to have gardens on the roofs. 

The houses are admirably lighted from the streets, 
and on that side they have plenty of air, but the back 
windows look upon narrow courts, often mere wells, 
which the great height of the houses makes gloomy. 
Once, for a fortnight, I had a room that looked into 
one of those wells, and the effect was so depressing that 
I should have preferred the poorest cottage in the coun- 
try. In all other respects the new houses are a great 
improvement on those built just before the time of 
Louis Napoleon, and beyond all comparison superior 
to the picturesque but ill-contrived tenements of the 
Middle Ages. 

There was one characteristic of Paris in the early part 
of the present century that has disappeared from the 
new streets : the old houses were so built, intentionally, 
that the fronts leaned back, sometimes with a curve 
that was very agreeable to artists. When Girtin went 
to Paris and made his sketches this inclination of the 
front was very common. You find it again in the etch- 
ings of Meryon and Lalanne. In contemporary street 
architecture it has been entirely abandoned for the per- 
pendicular. There is another change of at least equal 
importance. Before Louis Napoleon the houses were 



The Streets, 227 

generally of unequal height, but the love of the regular 
line made Haussmann's Paris almost as regular at the 
cornice as at the curbstone. These changes no doubt 
give a more orderly appearance to the city, but they 
detract sadly from its picturesque variety. In old Paris 
there were three distinct and notable irregularities: 
those in the tops of the houses, the slope of the fronts, 
and the ground-plan of the street, all of which are now 
replaced by straight lines. In some of the new streets 
the straight line is exceedingly wearisome ; it is so in the 
Rue de Rivoli. The reader will probably remember 
the passage in Mr. Arnold's essay on " The Literary 
Influence of Academies," where he criticises Mr. Pal- 
grave -^for naming the feeble frivolity of the Rue de 
Rivoli along with " the dead monotony of Gower or 
Harley Street, or the pale commonplace of Belgrave, 
Tyburnia, and Kensington." Mr. Arnold said that " the 
architecture of the Rue de Rivoli expresses show, splen- 
dor, pleasure, — unworthy things, perhaps, to express 
alone and for their own sakes, but it expresses them ; 
whereas the architecture of Gower Street and Belgravia 
merely expresses the impotence of the architect to ex- 
press anything." At the time when these criticisms were 
written the Rue de Rivoli occupied a very different rank 
among modern Parisian streets from that which it occu- 
pies at present. After the Boulevard Malesherbes, the 
Boulevard Haussmann, and the Avenue Friedland, the 
Rue de Rivoli, especially from the Place de la Concorde 
to the Rue du Louvre, appears, I should say, rather a 
street for business than anything else. The architec- 



2 28 Paris. 

ture is decent, but plain in the extreme. There is first 
a simple arcade, not on pillars with pretty capitals, but 
on plain square stone piers. Above the arches runs a 
cornice that is a balcony, and carries a simple iron rail- 
ing. The windows of the first floor have entablatures 
without sculpture, those of the second have none. On 
the third floor runs another balcony without ornament. 
I do not see either frivolity or pleasure here ; it would 
be scarcely possible to design anything more rigid in 
its severity. The houses might be a line of military 
barracks. Eastward of the Rue du Louvre the arcade 
comes to an end, and the fronts of the houses become 
more varied. After the construction of this street the 
architects seem to have perceived that the mechanical 
repetition of the same bay, the same arch with the same 
windows above it, might ultimately be carried too far; 
so, happily for the future of Paris, it was thought that 
the Rue de Rivoli and two or three little streets close to 
it were a sufficient supply of identical arches with win- 
dows and cornices running to a vanishing point, like an 
illustration in elementary perspective. 

The Avenue de I'Opera is much finer than the Rue de 
Rivoli, and owes much of its superiority to the variety 
of its architecture. It is really a pleasure to walk 
quietly down one side and study the architecture over 
the way. As I did this once with an old French gentle- 
man, who always foresees evil for his country, he lamented 
to me that the taste for material luxury should have 
become so predominant. To me it seems that a love 
for beautiful architecture is of all possible tastes the 



The Streets. 229 

least likely to be injurious in a wealthy nation. The 
satisfaction it afifords is purely artistic and intellectual. 
The carved stones are not couches of ease to lie down 
upon, nor dishes to pamper the appetite ; they belong 
to the poorest as well as the richest of the citizens. 
All that can be reasonably objected to is the waste of 
wealth in the repetition of forms that have no mean- 
ing, and that are simply customary. Even incongruous 
innovations may sometimes be useful as an interruption 
to what we see every day. Somebody has built a 
Moorish house in the Avenue de Friedland, which, 
though out of place there, strikes the eye with a change 
that is not unwelcome. The stately, separate mansions 
are a great reHef after the continuous blocks of buildings. 
It is much to be regretted that many fine old houses 
have disappeared, but a few are visible still. I remem- 
ber the feeling of sudden and keen pleasure with which 
I first came upon the Hotel La Valette on the Quai des 
Celestins. The restoration of it had been begun with 
the intention of making it a private museum, but it has 
changed hands and is now a school. These old houses 
are seldom preserved as residences, and the best that 
can happen to them is to be employed as museums, 
like the Hotel Carnavalet, which is to be the future 
lapidary museum of Paris and library of historical 
records concerning the history of the city.-^ This pro- 
ject was due to Baron Haussmann, the great destroyer of 

^ A description of the Hotel Carnavalet, with an account of the mu- 
seum, was published in " L'Art " for January i8 and January 25, 1880. 
The hotel is situated at the angles of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois and 
the Rue Sevigne, not far from the Rue Turenne. 



230 



Paris. 



old Paris, who in this instance appears as a preserver. 
The architecture of the hotel is heavy, but would 
appear much heavier if it were not lightened by the 
graceful sculpture of Jean Goujon. One of the curiosi- 







HOTEL DE SENS. 



ties of Paris in domestic architecture is the house on the 
Cours la Reine, called the Maison de Francois I. Here 
we have an excellent example of what ought to have 



The Streets. 231 

been done with many old houses. This one was erected 
near Fontainebleau by Francis I., and sold in 1826 to a 
private purchaser, who had every stone removed to Paris 
and erected again, as we see. The house is not large, 
but the size of it is practically much increased by its 
having been rebuilt on a broad basement that gives. a 
terrace round the building without injuring its archi- 
tecture in the slightest degree, while it affords ample 
room for kitchens and other offices and leaves the 
beautiful little house itself for the master and his 
family. In the front are three arches with a broad 
frieze above them. Above the frieze are three win- 
dows, very large in proportion, as they are divided 
only by piers the width of the pilasters in front of 
them and by their own heavy mullions and transoms. 
Over the windows is an entablature, and the whole is 
crowned with a parapet which is pierced over the 
windows, but not elsewhere, a refinement clearly dem- 
onstrating the artist-nature of the architect. There is 
no visible roof, but the need for one is not felt. The 
front is rich in beautiful sculpture, supposed to be by 
Jean Goujon, and including medallion-portraits of royal 
personages. There are also decorative trophies and 
subjects illustrating the vintage. 

Although the Hotel de Cluny has not been trans- 
ferred to another site like the Maison de Frangois I., 
it has been almost as wonderfully preserved. It w^as 
built at first by the Abbots of Cluny, but not much 
used by them. In the early part of the present century 
it was private property let in tenements to a number of 



232 Paris. 

tenants. It now belongs to the State, a happy result 
due entirely to the public spirit of a lady, Madame du 
Sommerard, widow of the antiquary and collector who 
had found a home for his treasures in the Hotel de 
Cluny, which he owned. Madame du Sommerard sold 
the whole together to the State at a loss to herself, as 
she had much more advantageous offers. Thus it has 
most happily come to pass that in the midst of a very 
busy part of Paris, close to the great Boulevards of 
St. Germain and St. Michel, there is a safe httle island 
of the past amid the noisy torrents of the present. I 
know nothing more delightful in Paris than the peace 
of the Hotel de Cluny; and what a wonderful piece of 
good luck it is that this beautiful relic of the fifteenth 
century should have been quite close to the most in- 
teresting remnant of Roman Paris, so that both can be 
kept together in the same safe enclosure ! I have only 
space to point to a few of the chief characteristics of 
the building. I do not know of any kind of domestic 
architecture quite so satisfactory as that when the 
house is isolated. For street architecture the modern 
Parisian is practically much better; but for a builder 
who has but one dwelling to erect, and is not restricted 
to ground-space, this fifteenth-century architecture is 
the one that best unites a homely expression with 
beauty and convenience. The walls, are not too high, 
the roof has a comfortable appearance, the building 
is of ample size yet not wearisome in vastness ; it is 
not a proud palace, but a beautiful home that one 
might live in habitually and love with intense affection. 



The Streets. 233 

The windows in the walls are square-headed, with mul- 
lions, transoms, and weather-mouldings that connect 
the windov\^s together. There is a pierced parapet, and 
the dormer-windows are beautifully finished with pinna- 
cles and finials. There are several staircase turrets. 
It is beyond my province here to speak of collections, 
but thosein the Hotel de Cluny, illustrating the Middle 
Ages and the Renaissance, are as interesting as the de- 
lightful building that contains them. The Louvre is the 
place to study sculpture, but the lover of cm'ving (in 
stone, wood, and ivory) should go to the Hotel de 
Cluny. The other beautiful example of fifteenth- 
century domestic architecture, the Hotel de Sens, also 
built by a great ecclesiastic (the Archbishop of Sens) 
for his town residence, is remarkable for the great de- 
velopment of bartizan turrets relatively to the rest of 
the building. I do not know of any edifice whatever 
in which they are relatively so large ; but as they are 
enriched with panels and carving, the size of them may 
be forgiven. They have become very familiar objects 
of late years, as the hotel is unfortunately occupied as a 
manufactory of sweets, and the enterprising maker uses 
a representation of the building in all his illustrated ad- 
vertisements. How little the architect in the fifteenth cen- 
tury foresaw this special kind of celebrity for his work ! 
There is a very curious example of the modern love 
of symmetry and order in the arrangements concerning 
the outside of St. Germain I'Auxerrois. As you stand 
under the eastern entrance to the old courtyard of the 
Louvre, the front of that church is to your right on 



234 Paris. 

the other side the Rue du Louvre, but it is not parallel 
with the street; it inclines towards the east. It was a 
very perplexing problem to get any symmetry out of 
that, but the solution was found in the construction 
of another building — a Mairie — inclined conversely, 
and in the erection of a tower between the two. St. 
Germain I'Auxerrois is in Gothic, and the Mairie is 
in a modified Renaissance ; yet the architect has had 
the art and skill to give, in Renaissance, an echo of the 
Gothic ideas in the church, so that there is a strong 
general resemblance between the Mairie and the church, 
in spite of the difference of style. 

The vast increase of wealth and luxury in Paris dur- 
ing the present century has led to the construction of a 
great number of isolated dwellings, many of which would 
deserve study as examples of modern house-architecture. 
They are generally much superior to the London villa 
in elegance of design and in the quality and genuine- 
ness of the materials employed. The best of them are 
to be found in the regions near the Bois de Boulogne, 
especially about Passy and Auteuil. There are some 
particularly good examples on the Boulevard Beausejour 
and the Boulevard de Montmorency. The misfortune 
of most residences of that kind is that they are almost 
sure to be injured by the too near neighborhood of 
others. I remember a house on the Boulevard Beau- 
sejour which is of classic design and in very perfect taste, 
but it happens to be low and close to a lofty edifice that 
crushes it completely. Again, from the variety of styles 
adopted, it may easily happen that you cannot attune 




THE MAIRIE AND ST. GERMAIN L'AUXERROIS. 



The Streets. 235 

your mind to the enjoyment of one style because a style 
with opposite qualities is forcing itself upon your atten- 
tion at the same time. Formerly, when land was cheaper, 
there were many isolated houses within the fortifications 
which stood in their own little parks, quite separated from 
others by groves of shady trees. These little parks are 
becoming fewer every day. Where one villa stood thirty 
years ago three stand now, and sometimes half-a-dozen. 
Besides this, the old region for villas — Auteuil — is be- 
coming a town like Passy. Enormous blocks of new 
houses, as large and lofty as any in the heart of Paris, 
are rising on the park lands and cutting them into 
formal streets. An old friend of mine had a delicious 
retreat at Auteuil, — a small house in a large space of 
grass and grove. I went to find it this year, and found 
a block of buildings six stories high and as long as the 
Hotel du Louvre. 

The tendency of the French towards orderly and 
methodical arrangement is exemplified nowhere more 
strongly than in the radiation of the avenues from the 
Arc de I'Etoile. That huge triumphal arch is admirably 
situated on its height, and the ediles appear to have 
determined that it should be seen from as many points 
as possible. There is no more stately arrangement in 
any capital than the wheel of streets that radiate from 
that wonderful centre. There are twelve of them, three 
of which are a hundred metres wide, while seven of 
them are more than a thousand metres long, and in five 
directions there is a clear view of more than an English 
mile. Such sort of beauty and sublimity as the straight 



236 Paris. 

and broad street has to offer, with its interminable rows 
of trees, its vast causeways, its lofty houses, has surely 
been here attained, if anywhere. I admit the grandeur, 
the masterful thoroughness with which the idea has 
been carried out, but never felt the slightest desire to 
live in streets so totally wanting in homeliness. Many 
a snug, unpretending old house in some dull provincial 
town has inspired me with a sudden, almost envious 
affection ; but in these wearisome long avenues the best 
thing seems to be the tram-car that carries one well to 
the end of them. 

A question very nearly affecting the appearance of 
Parisian streets is at this date (1885) looming in the 
immediate future. Paris is to have internal railways. 
Commissioners have examined our London underground 
system, and they have also examined the American 
aerial system. For a long time the decision was un- 
certain, although it was confidently announced that the 
American system had been adopted. Now, however, it 
appears that the three powers, the Government, the 
Municipal Council of Paris, and the Conseil General des 
Pouts et Chatissees are finally of one mind upon the sub- 
ject, and before these words are printed it is likely that 
their scheme will have received the assent of the Cham- 
bers. It includes a great line traversing Paris from east 
to west on the right bank of the Seine, and also a great 
line crossing this from north to south. Besides these, 
there will be a curved line on the left bank, and the 
plan leaves room for extensions. The important ques- 
tion whether the new metropolitan railway is to be sub- 




■ mJilf^T^ 



. rr< 



w$mmw} 



The Streets. 237 

terranean as in London, or above the streets as in New 
York, is decided in favor of a subterranean line for all 
the more crowded parts of the city, which leaves a lati- 
tude for the aerial system elsewhere. Every one who 
cares for the beauty of the most beautiful modern 
capital must learn with apprehension that aerial rail- 
ways will be tolerated in it anywhere. Certainly there 
is a degree of architectural taste and knowledge in Paris 
that may preserve it from the engineering monstrosities 
which England and America tolerate, and it is prob- 
able that if aerial railways are made at all, they will be 
designed with as much art and care as the nature of the 
erection will permit. Still, a row of cast-iron columns 
supporting an endless bridge in two stories can hardly 
be otherwise than mechanically monotonous.^ 

Here may end this series of chapters on Paris, with 
regard to which the writer is clearly aware that so vast 
a subject cannot be treated without many omissions.^ 
He has principally concerned himself with its artistic 
aspects, and has only made occasional reference to the 

1 So far as the scheme is known hitherto, the aerial railway is to be a 
double line in which one pair of rails will be placed above the other. 

2 For example, I have omitted the Palais Royal, but that is chiefly in- 
teresting historically; the present building is of little architectural im- 
portance, and the little shops in the square that were such an attraction 
in the time of our grandfathers are eclipsed by others in the new streets. 
I should have liked to mention some fountains and other things, but it is 
most diflicult to compress accurate description, and criticism that gives 
reasons, within narrow limits. The Church of St. Germain des Pres 
would have been an excellent subject for a chapter if the old Roman- 
esque edifice had been preserved in its integrity, but as that is not the 
case I preferred to speak of churches fully representative of their styles. 



2'SS Paris. 

far wider historical and social aspects, concerning which 
the reader may find abundance of information else- 
where. Paris, as it exists at present, is the model 
modern city that others copy, and that London herself 
is probably destined to copy when the density of popu- 
lation makes it more and more necessary to pile many 
human beings on a square mile, without impeding a 
constantly increasing circulation. What is chiefly to 
be regretted in the French capital is, that of the beauti- 
ful mediaeval city that preceded it so little — and that 
only in isolated specimens — has been preserved to our 
own time. The Present is merciless to the Past, and 
merciless it has always been. It may, however, be truly 
said that our age shows less of this mercilessness than 
its predecessors. When they preserved things it was 
chiefly from carelessness and indolence; but, we pre- 
serve, when we think of it to preserve at all, from artistic 
or archaeological interest. No century but our own 
ever made intentional sacrifices for the preservation of 
ancient monuments. The nineteenth century has made 
some sacrifices of this kind ; its shame is that they have 
been so few. 



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